Mean Babies: Psychological Study Reveals Early Bias in Infancy

A new psychological study from the University of British Columbia's Centre for Infant Cognition found infants as young as nine months old prefer individuals who are like them and mean to others they perceive as different.

The research was conducted by Kiley Hamlin, a professor at the University of British Columbia at Yale University with her adviser Karen Wynn and colleagues Neha Mahajan of Temple University and Zoe Liberman of the University of Chicago.

In the study, published in the medical journal Psychological Science, 200 infants aged between 9 and 14 months were given a choice of snacks, either graham crackers or green beans. Then researchers conducted a puppet show for the subjects, where puppet 1 preferred the same snack that the baby chose, while puppet 2 chose other snack.

Researchers introduced infants' two new puppets one was helpful and retrieved a dropped rubber ball. The other was mean and took the ball away.

Researchers then wanted to know if infants' preference for similar individuals meant that they hold negative attitudes towards those who are unlike themselves. So the infants were introduced to the puppets and given a choice to play with, "almost all the infants at both ages preferred the character who harmed the dissimilar puppet over the character who helped him." Watch videos from the experiments.

Lead researcher, Karen Wynn of Yale University said, "We were surprised-and more than a little chagrined-to find that babies actively prefer individuals who mistreat someone whose tastes differ from theirs. But while our findings show that we may be built to dislike differences, we are also built to like similarities-and humans all around the world are similar in a multitude of ways."

Researcher Kiley Hamlin remarked, "The fact that infants show these social biases before they can even speak suggests that the biases aren't solely the result of experiencing a divided social world, but are based in part on basic aspects of human social evaluation."

"Infants might experience something like schadenfreude at the suffering of an individual they dislike. Or perhaps they recognize the alliances that are implied by social interactions, identifying an 'enemy of their enemy' (i.e., the harmer of a dissimilar puppet) as their friend," theorizes Hamlin.