A puppet show featuring characters representing different shapes illustrates a core aspect of developmental psychology, focusing on infants’ preferences for helping behaviors. In this scenario, depicted in a Netflix documentary from 2020, a red circle attempts to ascend a hill but receives help from a blue square, while a yellow triangle obstructs its progress. After the show, the infant, Zoe, chooses the blue square, reflecting a potential preference for helpers over hinderers.
This scene recreates a well-known 2007 study by developmental psychologist Kiley Hamlin, now of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, which demonstrated that infants as young as six months tend to favor characters that assist others. Hamlin theorized that this ability to assess others’ behaviors may develop prior to speech and could be a biological trait.
In the years following the original study, numerous replications were attempted, though many yielded inconsistent results or indicated that situational factors could influence the outcomes. Frustrated by the unclear findings, Hamlin established a collaboration among 37 research groups across 18 countries to repeat her experiment with over 1,000 infants, aiming for more definitive results.
Difficulties in replicating fundamental studies in psychology contributed to what has been termed the replication crisis, with many high-profile studies failing to reproduce their initial findings. Many researchers pointed to the small sample sizes of earlier studies as a key issue. This led to an emphasis on larger, collaborative efforts to validate research findings.
As a result, international projects, such as those led by Hamlin and Michael Frank of Stanford University, focused on large-scale replications to enhance the statistical power of psychological research. These efforts span beyond infant cognition, engaging various studies on cognition across multiple species.
The collaborative approach is seen as beneficial, allowing diverse expertise and broader participant representation. For instance, the ManyBabies project focuses on infant development research, and its projects have included investigations into social evaluation. One study, which examined Hamlin’s original helper-preference concept, yielded results suggesting that infants showed no clear preference between helpers and hinderers, prompting further discussions regarding the implications for understanding infant behavior.
Another collaboration, called ManyBirds, included 129 researchers from 77 institutions across 24 countries, exploring aversion to novelty in birds. This study provided insights into how different species respond to unfamiliar objects in their environment, reaffirming some existing hypotheses about behavior in ecological contexts.
A new initiative, ManyManys, aims to explore cognitive traits, such as reversal learning, across a broad range of species, including humans, dogs, and various types of animals. This project seeks to deepen understanding of cognitive evolution by comparing diverse animal responses to changing circumstances in reward-based tasks.
While the collaborative model has strengths, such as enhancing expertise and participant diversity, it also presents challenges, particularly in terms of organizational complexity. For example, the ManyDogs study aimed to clarify whether dogs interpret human pointing as a social cue or as a command. Researchers tested over 450 dogs using a design developed collectively by multiple research teams across several countries.
Source: www.nature.com via Google News.
