Oh mate, you are covered
in dribble-dribble.
We could celebrate
him being born, essentially,
and being part of our family,
with our family and friends.
And to be fair, like, just any excuse
to eat a bit of cake, really [laughs].
Can you say hi?
Babies, from the moment they're born,
want to connect with people.
They want to engage. They're interested.
And they want to connect with us
in a meaningful, emotional way.
It is important to understand
how do these connections actually form,
and when does this begin?
And how does it begin?
[man] Good afternoon, and welcome everyone
to the naming of Theodore.
Theodore, you are my proudest achievement.
For you, my son, have really
touched my heart in a way
that nobody else can,
and for that I thank you.
We're finding that babies
are not passive creatures
for whom the social world
happens around them.
They are active members
of the social world
from the very beginning of their lives.
They are understanding others,
they are judging them,
and they are acting on those judgments.
[applause, cheering]
[woman]
Humans are a super social species.
We live in complex societies
built by humans collaborating together.
How do babies make
the extraordinary journey
from never having seen a person before
to becoming fully fledged members
of the social world?
We've been trying
to move or sort of
in the process of moving,
for... I think it's nearly seven months.
[man] About 7 months, yeah.
[Billie] 7 months.
But moving with a baby is very stressful.
You're trying to get
everything done around
when they're asleep.
But then you can't make too much noise
before Theo is like, "What's going on?
I want to be a part of it."
He'll lay there and sort of
look around and babble to you.
[coos]
What've you been up to?
[Theo babbling]
-Yeah? Really?
-[Billie laughing]
-Okay.
-[Theo babbles]
-Wow.
-[Billie laughs]
[Billie] It's just, it's so funny.
He's so young,
and he's already made such an impact.
[Billie]
Can you say, "Well done, Daddy"?
[Rich]
You'll see your new room soon. Yeah.
[woman] I grew up in India
and I came to Britain only as an adult,
so all my identity-forming years
were really Indian.
One of the things
that I absolutely remember
is this kind of always
having people around.
There was always someone
you could go and chat to,
who would be doing
something in the kitchen.
Coming from a very
socially connected society,
it's probably not surprising
that I've ended up...
thinking that the most important thing
for human psychology
is connection.
[laughing]
[woman] Heya, Ma.
[Reddy] To relate to people socially,
to be good at interacting...
Hello.
...you need to be able to have some grasp
of what people are thinking and feeling.
And it used to be thought
that babies can't do this.
When I started out as a psychologist,
I didn't really know babies.
I was studying seven-year-old kids.
I thought babies were...
boring, really.
You were really, really alert.
That's the thing,
-[man] You were.
-You were really wide awake and alert...
-[man] Yeah.
-...after you were born.
All that changed when I had my own kid.
You were, like,
probably about 20 minutes old...
-Really?
-...at that time.
The experience of interacting with her,
even in the first few days,
weeks of birth,
was mind-blowing.
It was like, here was this creature.
who's just come into the world
and is completely able to engage
and connect with me.
Something was going on there,
and I wanted to know,
how genuine are these connections?
Are they simply fake,
or is there something
really connected going on?
This is Eloisa.
She is three and a half months old...
more or less, give or take.
[in Spanish]
What's happening, my love?
She'll be playing, and someone comes in,
and she's like, paying attention.
She can't get enough
of whatever's happening around her.
She smiles to her brother and sister.
Yay!
[in Spanish] Did she eat your finger?
[girl babbling]
[Agustina] And this is Augusto.
He's the tiny one of the two.
They are twins.
I love it,
how he looks up to his sister...
whenever I put them together to play,
and he's always looking at her
copying whatever she's doing.
[Agustina] Since they were born,
they would look at you and...
and lock with your eyes and just engage.
[Agustina] Shh, shh, shh.
[fussing]
[Agustina] And Eloisa...
[in Spanish] What?
...I think she understands.
I don't know how, but she understands.
[in Spanish] Hello, my love. Hello.
[Reddy] After Shyamali was born,
we kept a diary of how things emerged,
kinds of facial expressions
and what she was doing
and what we felt in order to explore
how babies come
to understand other people.
It was like being
a bit of an anthropologist, really,
except this was
an anthropologist with babies.
So this was...
from... the fifth of April.
Right? So you would've been... two months.
I've written that from about that,
you started bringing arms and fists
up to your face when you were very happy,
and with full smiles
and sometimes half-shut eyes,
giving the impression
of classical Hindi film coyness.
[laughing]
You were going all like this,
and it was like, what?
It was weird. It was really, like--
I couldn't figure it out.
Okay, one more slide,
and there's a whole sequence of slides,
and this is one in the sequence.
I come and say hello to you and you smile
broadly and then you kind of go all coy.
This was a phenomenon called
the coy smile.
Unlike ordinary smiles,
there was either turning away of the head
or turning away of gaze,
or this arm curving
happening within the peak of the smile.
That was the criterion
for counting it as a coy smile.
You were very, very cute.
That is adorable.
[woman laughs]
[Reddy]
It's an expression of self-consciousness
brought about
by somebody else's attention.
It was telling me
babies can feel the power
of other people's feelings and intentions.
[Adam] That's right.
[Reddy] It was the emotional significance
of it that was important.
Coy smiles had never been...
documented in babies
as young as two to four months.
I decided to study this further
to see if it was actually common,
when did it start,
and in what context did it occur?
To actually find evidence of coy smiles,
my solution
was to use parents as informed observers.
[woman] Hello. Hi.
Hi, okay, is that okay?
[woman] Of course, come in.
So I basically followed five babies
in weekly home visits.
[woman] Oh, okay.
Starting from around seven weeks of age,
and going until about four,
four and a half months of age.
-[baby coos]
-[Reddy laughs] I know, look at that.
-[woman] That was, like, coy.
-That was one, wasn't it?
-Was it?
-That was good.
So you haven't noticed
this kind of thing before,
where she's smiling at you
and then kind of going a little bit coy?
No, no.
[Reddy] I filmed the babies
in three different ways,
in a chair in the sitting room
and the parent would chat
with them face-to-face.
[woman] Hi.
Hi.
Are you okay?
Taking a nap? Yeah?
I also filmed me as a stranger
talking to the baby...
[laughs]
That's another one.
...and the parent
holding the baby in front of the mirror.
Hello.
Okay.
[Reddy] What I was looking for
was different kinds
of interaction situations
which might bring out
these coy reactions.
Okay, so this is a video
of another baby in the study.
She was ten and a half weeks.
And this is the key thing.
What she's doing here
is beaming
and going shy when her eyes meet her eyes.
Then she gets this absolutely
full-blown smile
and starts turning away,
and she kind of turns away
at the peak of the smile,
and then comes back again.
But in order to be sure
that they are coy smiles,
you analyze the smiles frame by frame.
They are coded in terms of
their duration, their intensity,
whether there was return of gaze
immediately after, and so on.
We recorded from these tapes
a total of 674 smiles,
and of these,
there were 140 smiles altogether
which were analyzed as coy smiles.
Coy smiles were not supposed
to occur in the first year,
and yet they're occurring.
It was like, oh, my God, it's true,
I wasn't completely dreaming.
Coyness, coy smiling,
they're difficult to study.
But I think they're absolutely crucial
for telling us how babies,
from the earliest moments,
relate to people,
how they connect with people,
and how they understand people.
Little Henry.
[laughter, cooing]
-[child laughing]
-[woman] You have it.
[babies laughing]
[girl] Peek-a-boo!
[Reddy] By the time you get to
about the middle of the first year,
a whole new kind of emotional
engagement opens up.
And these are all to do
with humor, mischief, and playfulness.
[laughing]
Boo, boo! Boo, boo! [babbling]
Hello, there you are.
[both laughing]
[Reddy] What babies laugh at
and how they laugh
tells you a lot about
their understanding of other people,
and this is what
I then started to look at.
And this little fella has found something
that really amuses him... apart from food.
It's car horns.
-Beep, beep!
-[Pascoe laughs]
[laughs]
-Beep, beep!
-[laughs]
[Reddy]
It used to be thought that babies
couldn't really be said
to have a sense of humor
until sometime in the second year.
But there was one video incident
I captured with my daughter
when she was 11 months old.
So she's playing
with some object over there.
[tape rewinding]
You hear a sound,
and it's the snoring of Great-Grandma,
who's sitting along with
the rest of the family here on the sofa.
So she hears that sound of the snore,
she turns, she looks at her granddad,
who's sitting over there, turns back...
and imitates that's funny face.
The snoring face. Right?
And everybody laughs.
So she looks around
at everybody laughing,
is incredibly pleased,
and then she proceeds to do it again
because this is what elicited
the laughter from people.
And that's the face.
This, for me, is,
in a very simplified form,
is what humorists do.
You want other people to laugh, you find
what makes them laugh, and you repeat it.
People simply hadn't looked
for the creation of humor in babies.
So, I embarked on the study with parents.
I was going to their homes...
like, every two weeks
for the next five months.
It was a long slog.
Okay, so this is a file of interviews,
interview transcripts
with parents of eight-month-olds.
This is a funny one.
Victoria, that's the little girl,
had a bit of a cough.
And the mother said, "Oh, bad cough
[coughs]"
And of course the baby then repeated
"cough, cough" and imitated it,
and they went on, according to the mother,
for about nine or ten different goes.
Could she just be doing it
for the sensation of it?
And the mother says, "No. She's doing it,
and then she looks at you and she laughs.
She knows she's being funny."
It's not just for a sensation,
says her mother.
So this challenges this idea that babies,
in the first year, aren't humorists.
And there's one more thing
that I found babies doing,
which really got me thinking.
Shyamali was nine months old...
sitting in her high chair.
She's looking for something to do
to engage her dad,
and she offers this piggy bank.
She's just got a slight touch of a smile,
and as he reaches out,
you can see her smile broadens
and she starts whipping it back,
and she's grinning.
-[father] Oh, give it to me.
-[Reddy] This was teasing.
-[father] She'd have run away, too.
-[Reddy] Teasing is amazing.
But for me, it was...
it was a real revelation.
Babies of nine and ten months
were working out
exactly what affected
the people around them
in order to muck about
with other people's expectations.
[babbles]
[Adam] Ta...
You cheeky...
She took it away from my hand.
Come on. Bedtime... baby.
[man] Your wave--
[baby vocalizing]
You're not gonna do it.
You're just gonna do it normal.
[Reddy] Before they can talk,
babies try to make us laugh.
They playfully provoke us.
They tease us.
This is funny, but it isn't just fun.
[babbling]
[Reddy]
They are attempts to connect with us
in a meaningful...
emotional way.
-[Pascoe sighs]
-[Amelia imitates]
[Reddy]
This is very important for parents.
If we take up that invitation to connect,
what we're doing is actually enriching
our connection with the baby
and helping development as well.
[in Spanish] Mama?
-You can see it there where the bridge is.
-Yes.
[Agustina] They are both
getting more social in different ways.
Eloisa loves going out.
She's always very smiley, very happy.
When she catches someone's
looking at her she smiles,
engages a little bit, and then goes on
doing whatever she's doing.
[Agustina, grandmother
speaking Spanish]
[Agustina] Augusto was a bit behind
on development.
[Agustina speaking Spanish]
But recently they're always both
trying to make us laugh.
They compete for attention.
[in Spanish]
Are you giving it to me?
So it's who does the funniest thing.
They pull faces.
They do, like, fake coughing and giggling.
I like to think we're communicating.
Otherwise, I'm just talking to myself.
[Billie] Theo has a cleft lip,
basically where
the lip hasn't formed completely.
He has to have an operation
to repair the cleft.
Apart from it being
a little more difficult to feed,
and his speech might be affected by it,
we've had no issues.
And I just look at him
and I just think, "You're great.
You are perfect just the way you are."
But we've had a lady look
into the pram and say, "Ugh."
I've had a fair few people say to me,
"What's wrong with his lip?"
It's just being rude.
He's gonna grow up,
and he will go out and he'll have friends.
They might look at him
and see a scar.
But it won't be as obvious as a cleft.
-[woman 1] Morning!
-Hiya.
-[woman 2] Morning.
-Hi.
[woman 1] Hello, gorgeous. Hello.
That's a nice big smile,
isn't it, this morning?
[man] So it's a bit of a stressy day,
but every day gets better after today
in terms of how he's back
to his normal self.
Generally, when he wakes up, there's going
to be a little bit of blood on his lip.
So don't worry about that too much,
we'll give that a clean up tomorrow.
Okay, then.
-He'll do well.
-Cool, thank you.
[Surgeon] See you a bit later.
[woman]
You gonna play with this one?
[laughs]
Say thank you.
[woman] Alright.
-Let's start.
-[Billie] Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I know it's the right thing,
but no mother wants their child
to have an operation.
Wake up.
[Rich] It's just what needs to happen
to give him a perfectly healthy,
normal life.
[Theo breathing heavily]
You give mommy big cuddles.
Missed you. I had to put up with your dad.
[Rich chuckles]
Yeah.
[woman] When I got started in science,
I was interested
in the origins of human behavior.
And in particular,
what mechanisms allow humans
to enter into lifelong
social relationships.
Humans are clearly highly judgmental
of those in their social environment.
And the question is,
when does that begin?
And where do those
kinds of judgments come from?
When kids are in preschool, they evaluate
others based on how they behave,
deciding whether they're one
of the good ones or one of the bad ones.
But no one had ever asked
whether very young children
are already noticing
who's good and who's bad.
In 2005, when I started,
I simply wanted to know whether babies are
making those kinds of social judgments.
-Hi. Is this Zoey?
-[woman] This is Zoey.
Thank you so much for coming in.
We're interested in
social cognitive development.
In particular, we're interested
in babies' understanding of those
who help others versus those
who what we call hinder others
or prevent them from getting their goals.
Today, we're gonna show her a puppet show.
The question that we were asking was,
"Do babies pick out whether somebody
intends good things or bad things?"
We use puppet shows because
we've found that babies love
watching them.
The hill puppet show
involves three characters.
[squeaky toy squeaks]
[Carpenter]
There is a climbing character,
who repeatedly tries, but fails,
to climb to the top of a steep hill.
A second character comes in and basically
pushes him up to the top of the hill.
This is who we call the helper.
A third character will come...
and push him to the bottom of the hill.
We call him the hinderer.
Babies liked looking at these things.
They cared a lot about them and they were
trying to figure out what was going on.
That was perfect!
She watched that really well.
Babies can't tell us in words
who they liked more.
But what they can do is make choices.
Who do you like?
At the end of the show,
somebody brings out a board
with the helper and hinderer
resting on it.
That guy?
And we see which one they touch first.
That guy? You like that guy?
That guy?
What we observed is that
almost every single baby
who sees the show
chooses the helper.
That guy?
Okay, good choice.
Yes.
It was really sort of, "Oh, my goodness,
we've really stumbled on something here."
So in blue we have the percentage
of babies who chose the helper,
and in yellow the percentage
of babies who chose the hinderer.
As you can see,
of six-month
olds there's actually no yellow,
because not a single six-month-old
reached for the hinderer.
And here we found that two
out of the 16 ten-month-olds did.
There's really enormous preference
for the helper over the hinderer.
This was really shocking.
We also showed three-month-olds
the same puppet shows.
And, like older babies,
they preferred the helper.
To observe such a thing
in a baby barely three months old
was just unbelievable.
As a child, I had a strong sense
that humans are taught morality
over time by their parents.
But these results opened up
the possibility that...
morality is not all learned.
That there's some innate or inborn
basis to our human capacity for morality.
that babies bring to the table with them.
So we wanted to go
a little bit deeper into this tendency
to distinguish
the good guys from the bad guys.
[baby calling out]
[Rich laughing] Whoop!
[woman] God bless him.
[Rich] You can tell, with his legs.
You know he's happy
when he's kicking his legs like that.
It's lovely to have him back with us.
Is that nice?
Is that nice? Is it good?
I can't believe how well
he's bounced back.
Hello.
Yeah.
-[Billie] He's fine, look at him.
-[Rich] He is.
Theo's been a fighter,
really, and he's just, you know,
taking it in his stride.
Admittedly, it was more of a challenge
than I expected to see the lip,
and I did feel... a mixture of things.
If you've just, if you fold that-- hello.
[Rich] It's made me look back, no doubt.
I was born with a cleft.
I don't want the same kind of
judgmental opinions for Theo
that people had when I was a kid.
[Billie] Are you rocking him to sleep
[indistinct]?
[Rich] I'll give it a go, just sit down.
As a society, we judge far too much,
and if I can challenge that then I think
that's my job, really, as a dad to him.
[Hamlin] As adults, we're really drawn
to those who are like us.
We want to be friends
with individuals
who, say, share our opinions
about sports teams
or politics or religion.
And we tend to avoid those
who feel differently than we do.
Given that ideas about whether
others are like me or not like me
are so important for adults,
we were interested in whether they also
influence babies' social judgments.
To explore this, we used
a different kind of puppet show.
And up goes the curtain.
[toy squeaks]
So first we offer babies the choice
between two snacks,
graham crackers and green beans.
This choice simply allows us to establish,
for babies, what their preference is.
Would you like a snack?
Yummy, yummy.
Then we take babies into the puppet
showroom and show them two puppets.
Alright.
Alright, so for this part,
we're actually going to get you
to sit on this little chair,
and if you just sit kind of sideways,
and if she faces across this way...
Alright.
You guys comfy?
-Yep.
-Okay, great.
Hi, Annika.
Hi.
[clicks tongue]
[in cartoonish voice] Mmm. Yum.
I like graham crackers.
[normal voice] One puppet likes
the same food as the baby,
so that puts them on the same team.
Blech. Yuck.
I don't like green beans.
Then, babies are shown a puppet show
involving their teammate, the puppet
who shared their food preference,
playing with a ball.
And the puppet
unfortunately drops its ball...
and has its ball given back to it
by who we call the helper.
And babies watch as a puppet
repeatedly loses his ball.
They see the helper
always return the ball.
Then babies watch their teammate
playing with another character,
the hinderer.
And they see the hinderer
always steal the ball away.
Next, we present infants with the choice
between the helper and hinderer puppets.
Hi.
Look.
Hi.
Who do you like?
That guy.
We find that when the character who lost
his ball was on the same team as babies
that they prefer the helper
to the hinderer.
Big hug for that puppet, huh?
Give him a kiss. Yay!
Good job.
And in particular, that they like those
who help their team members.
Next we wanted to know
if babies would think differently
when the target of their action
was somebody not on their team.
A puppet who didn't share
their food preference.
Hi.
Mmm. Yum.
I like green beans.
When we presented babies
with the choice between the helper
and the hinderer, we observed
something really surprising.
Hi.
Hi.
Look.
Hi.
Who do you like?
That guy?
That guy!
Most of the babies preferred the hinderer,
the character who'd taken the ball away
from somebody who wasn't on their team.
We tested a total of 48 babies,
and what we found is that when the puppet
was on a different team from babies,
the character who hindered.
Hi. Who do you like?
Babies are not always preferring those
who help over those who harm.
When the target of an action
is someone not on their team,
they were, in fact,
liking someone who was mean.
Babies' morality is selective morality.
It's for individuals
that are similar to me,
and it's not for individuals who aren't.
This means babies have a long way to go
before they get to the kind of morality
that we hope that they'll practice in
their everyday lives as adults.
[Kiley] Hey, guys.
Hi, Kiley.
How's it going?
Humans are perhaps the only species
that regularly gets together
to help perfect strangers
and people in other groups.
My lab in particular has, you know,
dozens of members who every year
participate in a run called the Sun Run.
Runners sign up knowing that part of it is
to take off their sweatshirts and jackets
and throw them on the side, knowing that
someone's going to come and collect them
and distribute them
to homeless people around the city.
The morality we see in adults
is of course different from the morality
that we're seeing in babies.
Babies have impressive
abilities from the get-go,
but those abilities need guidance.
So there's a job for parents in trying
to steer their children away from
the sort of group-based or team-based
morality that we're seeing in infants
to the larger moral community
that we would hope
that our children will eventually
come to reside in.
[babies cooing, chattering]
[Agustina] More and more
I try to let them play together,
but it's very clear they don't like
sharing between them.
[crying]
[Agustina in Spanish]
Don't fight! Why are you fighting?
[crying]
But if I ask for it, she'll give it to me.
She'll share it with me,
but not with Augusto.
They fight for stuff all the time.
[child speaking in Spanish]
[Agustina] I kinda want one day
to learn to play together.
I hope it gets better.
[woman] As an undergraduate,
I was very interested in language.
But I quickly realized that what was
the most interesting thing for me...
Hello.
...was what happens long before
infants can even talk.
And one of these to try.
[baker] Yeah, of course.
[Carpenter] What drew me in was not words,
but preverbal gestures.
Please.
So infants' first pointing gestures,
reaching gestures, showing gestures.
-Thanks very much. Have a good day.
-[door bell chimes]
A large part of our social interactions
consists of us simply sharing things,
sharing information with others,
sharing experiences with others.
[dog barks]
[Carpenter] One way in which we do this
is by pointing to things.
So I might point to something
interesting that I see
to draw my friend's attention to it,
and then we can talk about it.
It's effectively a meeting of minds.
And this is what we call joint attention.
Joint attention is such a crucial part
of our social interactions as adults
that I became interested in the question
of where it comes from.
When does it start?
[Rich] Come to Daddy?
[both] Yeah.
[Billie] Good boy, Theo.
Aww.
-[Rich] You're a good boy.
-[Billie] He's such a flirt.
[Billie chuckles]
Do you wanna go out there?
-[Rich] Wanna go outside?
-[Billie] Did you have a good nap?
I'd say, the last two months,
he's not a baby anymore,
he is a little person.
-[Rich] Cuddle.
-[Billie] He's a lot more receptive.
[Billie] He's had an operation.
You know, that's a lot to overcome.
Who's that? Can you see Daddy?
Where is he?
Where is he?
He just wants to be a part of everything.
The pointing is quite a recent thing.
Now he has another way
of telling us what it is that he wants
and it's also him questioning
what things are.
-[Billie] Rargh!
-Who's there?
[Billie] Hey!
There's Mommy!
Hi!
-Wobbly.
-Ah!
-Oh, no!
-It fell on the floor!
He couldn't ask us these things before,
whereas now he points all the time.
[Rich] Where do you wanna go?
What do you wanna play?
Ohh.
What's that?
[Billie] And it's amazing,
'cause he's learning so much.
You wanna come this way?
Yeah, come on then.
[Carpenter]
If you think about it,
joint attention actually requires some
pretty complex social cognitive skills.
To share an interest with somebody,
you have to understand first
that they can see things.
They have emotions
and interest that can be shared.
There were people who wondered
whether babies were really capable
of these complex social skills.
So it's supposed to be
about two point five meters away.
-Two point... perfect. Good.
-Are we good?
Alright, that's good.
[Carpenter] In the early 2000s,
we designed a study
of 12-month-old babies
who have just started pointing.
Our question was, are babies pointing
to share attention and interest,
to have this meeting of minds...
or is it that they're pointing
for simpler reasons?
Oh no. Okay, it has to be
big enough to get it out.
Perfect. Good.
Hello.
[woman] Hi there.
-[man] This is James and Rachel.
-[Carpenter] Hi, James.
-Hi.
-Hi, Rachel.
Hi, I'm Malinda.
You may have noticed that your kids
start pointing everywhere
at a certain age,
around this age, recently maybe.
So if you go to the zoo, they're pointing
out all the animals for you, sharing them.
And we wanna know why they do this,
which is what we're trying
to tell with this experiment.
[parent making whooshing sounds]
-That's cool.
-Wanna sit down?
[Carpenter]
The experiment works like this.
We sit the infant down
facing a big white curtain.
Get your legs. There we go.
[man] If you sit in this chair...
[Carpenter]
Suddenly, a puppet appears.
When infants notice this,
they often start to point to the puppet.
[man] Yeah.
[Carpenter] The key to the experiment
is how many times infants point.
What? Hello.
You're looking happy today.
For one group of babies,
in response to their points,
the experimenter doesn't
look at the puppet at all,
but just looks at the infant
and expresses positive emotions.
How you doin' there?
You doin' okay?
-[coos]
-You doin' all right there, Noah?
[Carpenter]
Initially, they pointed excitedly
and looked at the experimenter.
You've got big, brown eyes.
[Carpenter] When they got
the experimenter's strange reaction...
[Noah coos]
Hi Noah.
...they pointed again,
as if to say, "Hey, puppet.
Look, over there."
How you doing there?
You doin' okay?
[Carpenter] They kept on pointing
to direct the experimenter's attention.
But he's just not giving
them what they wanted.
Okay, this time, when the baby points,
just look at the puppets, but no reaction.
-Okay, so not looking at them or anything.
-Yeah.
[man] Okay.
[Carpenter] For another group,
the experimenter just looks at the puppet
when the baby points,
but not at the baby at all.
So they point again as if to say,
"Hey, isn't this cool?"
They kept pointing because
they weren't satisfied.
This reaction wasn't
what they wanted either.
-[baby vocalizes]
-Yeah.
What's here?
Oh, that's a good one.
Riley, look what's...
[Carpenter] In the last group,
the experimenter reacts
as anyone normally would.
[baby coos]
[baby verbalizes]
Wow.
[Carpenter]
He looks at what the baby's pointing to.
Wow.
That's cool.
He's dancing, yeah.
And looks back and forth a few times,
expressing excitement
and interest about the puppet.
Look at him dancing. He looks happy.
[man] That's cool, Riley.
[Carpenter] The babies pointed
once or twice to each puppet,
but then they stopped.
We tested 75 babies.
When the babies were happy
with the experimenter's reaction,
they pointed pretty close to just once.
whereas in the other two conditions,
they pointed significantly more often.
It's really the simplest thing.
When babies got a joint attention reaction
from the experimenter,
they stopped pointing pretty quickly
because they'd connected with him
and shared how they were feeling.
He's dancing. Yeah.
This is a purely social motivation.
-[Amelia] Did you see it?
-[fly buzzing]
-[coos]
-Is it up there?
Where is it now? Yeah, where is it?
That's where it is.
[indistinct babbling]
[Adam] Okay.
[woman] Bird? Out the window?
[Carpenter]
We engage in pointing gestures
all day every day without even realizing
how special they are.
[parent speaks in baby talk]
[Carpenter] Joint attention and pointing
are the first steps
into a shared world with others.
Shortly after that, infants start
to share goals and start to collaborate
and eventually share beliefs with others.
[Adam] Look!
[Carpenter] And sharing beliefs
in particular
is what create uniquely human things
like money and marriage and governments,
which only exist because
we collectively believe they exist.
All of these complex achievements
that we have as humans
begin in infancy,
around 9 to 12 months of age,
when infants start engaging
in joint attention and pointing.
[overlapping chatter]
-[woman] Yay Eloisa, Augusto!
-[applause]
[woman in Spanish]
Very good! Well done!
[Agustina]
The first year, it happens so, so quickly.
They're almost toddlers now.
It's our party
more than the babies' party.
They'll get the presents. [laughs]
But we get to enjoy it with friends.
[girl laughing]
[Agustina]
Now, they are fine with each other.
They can do things together.
They share a lot.
They share
with their brothers and sisters.
But... they are their own person.
Part of the fun, that they are completely
unique, different human beings.
[singing in Spanish]
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
[singing in Spanish]
♪ Happy birthday to you ♪
[man in Spanish] Blow out the candles.
Babies seem to be able to look out
at others interacting in the world,
to understand their different kinds
of actions and what they mean.
So parents should be thinking
of their babies as members
of their social world from the beginning.
[Reddy]
Babies want to have a dialogue with us.
They really need partners
who can get involved with them,
who give them the credit of being a person
in order for them to develop as a person.
[woman] That's for me? Oh, thank you.
[singing in Spanish]
♪ A lady was going to... ♪
[Carpenter] Talk to your baby
and share with your baby.
Pay attention to what they're looking at
and gesturing to.
[vocalizing with baby]
[Carpenter]
Because this is the foundation
of their incredible journey
into our social world.
[baby vocalizing]
[Agustina, in Spanish]
Hello.
[Billie] Whenever we go out,
it doesn't matter where we go.
He's so social, it is ridiculous.
Good boy. You saying hello?
Who's your partner in crime?
[Billie] Can you give it to Emma? [laughs]
Is that for me?
Oh! You meanie.
He's playing a game with me now. [laughs]
Yay!
I'm so proud of him.
He's really come into his own.
Yum, yum, yum.
Aw, good boy.
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