Infants make moral character inferences in multi-agent social interactions

The ability to infer character from behavior is an essential skill that adults use to navigate the social world. We investigated 12- to 24-month-old infants' (Experiment 1, n = 160; Experiment 2, n = 96) ability to infer an agent's moral character from a complex social situation using a behavioral generalization paradigm that capitalized on infants' visual attention. Infants observed a social event involving an aggressor, victim, and protector or bystander (Experiment 1; Experiment 2 replicated the aggressor and protector conditions). Then, infants saw one of these agents distribute resources fairly (i.e., equally) versus unfairly (i.e., unequally) between two recipients. We found that infants selectively expected protectors and victims to distribute resources fairly and had no significant expectations for bystanders. Infants either expected aggressors to be unfair (Experiment 1) or displayed no significant expectations for aggressors (Experiment 2). Exploratory analyses revealed that infants' moral character inferences were tied to infants' social contact: infants with siblings and daycare experience showed greater moral role differentiation (Experiment 2). These results suggest that infants can make broad character inferences in complex multi-agent social situations, and that their ability to differentiate moral roles strengthens with social experience.