Search for: All records

Abstract Possessiveness toward objects and sharing are competing tendencies that influence dyadic and group interactions within the primate lineage. A distinctive form of sharing in adultHomo sapiensinvolves active giving of high-valued possessions to others, without an immediate reciprocal benefit. In two Experiments with 19-month-old human infants (N = 96), we found that despite measurable possessive behavior toward their own personal objects (favorite toy, bottle), infants spontaneously gave these items to a begging stranger. Moreover, human infants exhibited this behavior across different types of objects that are relevant to theory (personal objects, sweet food, and common objects)—showing flexible generalizability not evidenced in non-human primates. We combined these data with a previous dataset, yielding a large sample of infants (N = 192), and identified sociocultural factors that may calibrate young infants’ sharing of objects with others. The current findings show a proclivity that is rare or absent in our closest living relatives—the capacity to override possessive behavior toward personally valued objects by sharing those same desired objects with others. 

Three hundred and ninety‐one children (195 girls;M_age = 9.56 years) attending Grades 1 and 5 completed implicit and explicit measures of math attitudes and math self‐concepts. Math grades were obtained. Multilevel analyses showed that first‐grade girls held a strong negative implicit attitude about math, despite no gender differences in math grades or self‐reported (explicit) positivity about math. The explicit measures significantly predicted math grades, and implicit attitudes accounted for additional variance in boys. The contrast between the implicit (negativity for girls) and explicit (positivity for girls and boys) effects suggest implicit–explicit dissociations in children, which have also been observed in adults. Early‐emerging implicit attitudes may be a foundation for the later development of explicit attitudes and beliefs about math.