Better together: 14-month-old infants expect agents to cooperate even when it’s costly

Humans engage in cooperative activities from early on and the breadth of
human cooperation is unparalleled. Human preference for cooperation might
reflect cognitive and motivational mechanisms that reinforce engagement in
cooperative activities. We applied the naive utility calculus model to
cooperation and investigated if 14-month-old infants expect agents to
prefer cooperative over individual goal achievement. Two groups of infants
saw videos of agents facing a choice between two actions that led to
identical rewards but differed in the individual costs. First, we
established that infants expect agents to make instrumentally rational
choices (prefer less costly individual actions). We then demonstrated that
when one of the action alternatives is cooperative, infants expected
agents to choose cooperation over individual action, despite the
cooperative action demanding more effort from each agent to achieve the
same outcome. This supports the proposal that infants may ascribe
additional rewards to cooperative actions that go beyond the observable
utility of instrumental actions.

This repository holds 3 data files relating to the following manuscript:
Vorobyova, L., Begus, K., Knoblich, G., Gergely, G., Curioni, A. (2022)
Better together: 14-month-old infants expect agents to cooperate
  These files are as follows:
        -
Exp1_data.xclx: output of participants’ looking time, coded offline from
the video recordings in Experiment 1.
        -
Exp2_data.xclx: output of participants’ looking time, coded offline from
the video recordings in Experiment 2.
        -
Exp3_data.xclx: output of participants’ looking time, coded offline from
the video recordings in Experiment 3. The data reported in these files is
described below.   Columns in the files:
       
Name - unique personal identifier of each participant
       
Trial - trial number for each looking time episode
       
Condition - condition for a given looking time episode: easy vs costly in
Exp1_data; joint vs individual in Exp2_data
       
Start Looking Time - start of a looking time episode in ms, counting from
the beginning of a given trial
        End
Looking Time - end of a looking time episode in ms, counting from the
beginning of a given trial
       
Looking Time episode - looking time episode in ms, calculated based on the
two previous variables. Multiple looking time episodes are possible in one
trial, if the time a participant looked away was less than 2 seconds. The
analysis was performed on the sum of looking time episodes for each trial.
                 Sex - sex of a participant