Denis Tatone

Sociologists in the crib: How infants represent social relations

We are born in a web of social relations; our very livelihood depends on them. From the first years of life, we face the challenge of discovering how the people around us are related to each other: who is friend, foe, or family. This ability is critical for choosing partners, creating or dissolving bonds, and becoming competent members of our communities. But how do social novices, like infants, solve this seemingly daunting task? How do they represent social relations, and which kinds of? How do they combine them together into basic social structures?

This is the question this course is set out to answer. Throughout the module, we will engage with experimental evidence suggesting that infants have a conceptual “grammar of social relations”: a minimal repertoire of relational models (such as communalism, reciprocity, and hierarchy) which they use to make sense of the interactions around them. In reviewing this literature, we will also discuss its methodological approaches (such as the use of looking behavior and manual choice to measure infants’ expectations and preferences); its relationship with related key competences for social living (such as inferring character traits and evaluating others); and its implications for the evolution of social eavesdropping in our species and other animals. By the end of this course, you will have gained insights into the minimal cognitive ingredients that allow every one of us to chart out and navigate social networks.