Infants’ intention-based evaluations of distributive actions

Recent research revealed that infants attend to agents’ intentions when they evaluate helping actions. The current study investigated whether infants also consider agents’ intentions when they evaluate distributive actions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old infants were first shown two failed attempts to perform a distribution. In the “failed equal distribution,” the distributor first tried to reach one of the recipients to deliver an apple, failed, and then attempted to reach the other possible recipient to deliver a different apple and also failed. In the “failed unequal distribution,” a different distributor always tried unsuccessfully to reach the same beneficiary. Then, in the test phase, infants were presented with the two distributors side by side, and infants’ spontaneous preferential looking and reaching actions were recorded. We found a reliable preference for the equal distributor in both the visual and manual responses. Experiments 2 and 3 helped to rule out alternative explanations based on perceptual cues and affiliative biases. Overall, these findings suggest that infants’ ability to evaluate distributive actions relies not only on the outcomes but also on the distributors’ intentions.