We are born to be social!

As humans, we are engaged in social behaviors on a daily basis - we nod at our colleagues when we see them on the hallway; we hold the door for the person behind us; we laugh at friends’ jokes at a party. All these interactions are based on successful understanding and interpretation of each other’s behaviors. How does ability, the ability to abstract goals and intentions, start?

Many studies have looked into the emergence of social behaviors - within the first year, little humans show various precursors of social behaviors. One of the most fascinating findings revealed by Andrew N. Meltzoff showed that in the first few weeks, babies imitate the specific facial expressions after seeing a person demonstrate the facial expressions like protruding his tongue or opening his mouth (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977). Then, it doesn’t take babies much long, within their first year of life, babies are able to imitate the behaviors that they have seen even after a 24-hour delay, what is often referred to as deferred imitation (Meltzoff, 1988). Fascinating! Little people progress so fast when we think they are just eating and sleeping! Imitation serves a critical social function and is one of the strongest learning mechanisms. We tend to mimic people that we like and studies show positive impacts on prosocial behaviors from mimicry (Baaren et al., 2003, 2004). For example, one study found that people tipped more when their waitress mimicked them by repeating their order. These findings manifest the social influence from imitation on interpersonal relationships, and illustrate that babies are equipped with this ability very early in their life.

Another indicator for the early emergence of social competence in young babies is intentional understanding. Reading people’s intentions from their behaviors supports our day-to-day social interactions with others. When you are introduced to a person at a party and the person reaches out her hand to you, you know immediately that she is trying to shake your hand instead of trying to reach for your pocket. As a result, you would naturally reach out your hand and make the handshake happen. This social interaction is based on your accurate interpretation of the intention underlying the person’s behavior, reaching out her hand. The match between your interpretation of the person’s demonstrated action and the person’s true intention creates a harmonious social interaction. Picture a different scenario: you are at a family dinner and the bottle of wine is sitting on your side of the table. Your partner reaches for his almost empty wine glass; without being asked, you will likely reach for the wine and pour more to your partner’s glass. We do this everyday - we interact with people based on our interpretation of their intentions, so we meet each other’s social intentions and create pleasant social experiences. We consider a social encounter smooth and enjoyable when we feel the other person’s behavior meets the intentions of our actions. On the contrary, when there is a mismatch between how the other person interpreted our behaviors and our true intentions, we find that social encounter awkward.

This ability to extract intentions doesn’t seem to require much experience. In the first 6 months, babies are able to detect the goals embedded in the goal-oriented actions. More importantly, 6-month-old babies only encode an action as goal-oriented when the actions are performed by a human arm, as opposed to an artificial rod (Woodward, 1998). These findings signify that young babies do not simply encode the physical information of your movements (e.g., where and when you pick up your phone), but they are able to recognize the goal of a movement. Moreover, to them, people and inanimate objects are treated differently when it comes to their interpretation of seemly-identical behaviors. Again, babies advance fast - at 12 months, they are able to interpret the goal embedded in a series of actions (Woodward & Sommerville, 2000). And at 18 months, babies are able to not only detect the goals embedded in actions, but also infer the intention behind the action that failed to complete its attempted goal (Meltzoff, 1995). This is a more advanced skill required in social scenarios that are more sophisticated, which often happen around us.

Let’s get back to the party scenario for a second: after you were introduced to your new friend, a new conversation circle was formed around you. One person in this circle told a joke, and unfortunately, not a very successful one for this particular group. In order to avoid the awkwardness, you might respond with related lines to smooth over the situation or laugh at it to play along. To be able to manage this potentially socially awkward situation in a sophisticated manner, you need to be able to infer the intention behind that joke which did not accomplish its goal.

The research on babies’ imitation and intentional understanding indicates early emergence of the competences supporting human social interactions. These early emergent social competences illustrate the critical role of social behaviors for human beings. We are born to be social and hardwired to communicate. We want to interact with people; we want to understand people, starting when we are still tiny babies, before we can talk and move ourselves. Being social is not an add-on for the human product, it is one of the core needs as a human!

If you have little ones at home, you might want to try one of the aforementioned studies with your little people. You will be amazed by how much of those fundamental social skills they have mastered.