Infants’ Relationship Inferences from Observations of Imitation and Helping

Human adults rely heavily on their social partners to meet the challenges of the world. This
dependency people have on their social network highlights the need to initiate and nurture
strong relationships. One critical challenge for fostering healthy relationships is determining
who would be a good (or bad) social partner. Adults have the advantage of drawing upon
their lifetime of experience and knowledge to inform their judgments of others, but a person’s
motivation to begin mapping their own social network may emerge in infancy. I will discuss
two related lines of work that provide evidence that infants use their 3rd-party observations of
imitation and helping to understand who is likely to act as a good social partner in the future.

Bill Pepe, 4th-year PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD),
works with advisor Dr. Lindsey Powell in the Experimental Psychology department. His
research program focuses primarily on early human concepts of social relationships and
morality: examining how infants and children use their observations of peoples’ social
relationships to guide their expectations and reasoning about prosocial and antisocial
behavior.