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aboutthe helper and the hinderer. Do they have a preference? From an adult perspective, the helper is a mensch and the hinderer is a jerk. In a series of experiments led by then–graduate student Kiley Hamlin, we asked whether babies have the same impression.
    Our first set of studies used three-dimensional geometrical objects manipulated like puppets instead of animations. (It might seem odd that we used objects instead of real people, but babies and toddlers are often unwilling to approach adult strangers.) And instead of using looking-time measures, which are ideal for exploring babies’ expectations, we adopted reaching measures, which are better for determining what babies themselves prefer. The scenarios were the same as those used in the previous experiment: a ball was either helped up a hill or pushed down the hill. Then the experimenter placed the helper and the hinderer on a tray to see which one the baby would reach for.
    (Some experimental details: to ensure that the babies were responding to the actual scenario, and not just to the colors and shapes of the different objects, we systematically varied who was the helper and who was the hinderer—for instance, half the babies got the red square as the helper; half got the red square as the hinderer. Another concern was unconscious cueing: if the adults around the baby knew who the good guys and bad guys were, they might somehow convey this information. To get around this problem, the experimenter holding out the characters didn’t see the puppet show and so didn’t know the “right” answer; also, the baby’s mother closed her eyes at the moment of choice.)
    As we predicted, six- and ten-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all of the babies reached for the good guy.
    Such a result is open to three interpretations. Babies might be drawn to the helpful individual, they might be repelled by the hindering individual, or both. To explore this, we introduced a new character that neither helped nor hindered. We found that, given a choice, infants preferred a helpful character to this neutral one and preferred this neutral character to one who hindered, indicating that babies were both drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost always showed this pattern of response.
    We then followed this up with a pair of studies looking at three-month-olds. Now, babies at that age really are sluglike; they can’t control their reaching well enough to be tested with our usual method. But we noticed something with the older babies that gave us a clue as to how to proceed. Upon analyzing the video clips, we found that they didn’t just reach for the helping character; they also looked toward the helping character. This suggested that for the younger babies we could use their direction of looking as a proxy for preference. When we showed the babies the two characters simultaneously, the effect was robust: the three-month-olds clearly preferred to look at the good guys.
    In a second study introducing the neutral character, we got an interesting pattern of success and failure. Like the six- and ten-month-olds, the younger babies looked longerat a neutral character than at a hinderer. But they did not favor the helper over the neutral character. This is consistent with a“negativity bias” so often found in adults and children: sensitivity to badness (in this case, the hinderer) is more powerful and emerges earlier than sensitivity to goodness (the helper).
    Our initial helper/hinderer studies were published in the journal Nature and generated a lot of discussion, both enthusiastic and skeptical. Our more critical colleagues worried that maybe babies weren’t actually responding to the goodness/badness of the interaction but rather to some nonsocial aspect of the scene. We worried about the same thing ourselves,