Decoding Academia 32: Do Babies REALLY like good guys?

Decoding the Gurus

Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne

Science, Leisure, Social Sciences, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2025

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode, Matt and Chris take a look at a recent developmental psychology paper on the social evaluation of young babies. Do they display a preference for agents who are nice to others or could they care less at the babbling age? This is a large-scale, multi-lab, preregistered replication effort of a rather influential paper so it ticks all of Chris' Open Science boxes, but how does Matt react? Is he stuck in his pre-replication crisis paradigms? Join us to find out and along the way find out about baby Matt's psychotic tendencies, how cats feel about cucumbers, and how Matt narrowly escaped being eaten by a big ol' crocodile.

Paper Reference: Lucca, K., Yuen, F., Wang, Y., Alessandroni, N., Allison, O., Alvarez, M., ... & Hamlin, J. K. (2025). Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study. Developmental Science, 28(1), e13581.

Original Study: Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450(7169), 557-559.

Decoding Academia 32

00:00 Introduction

00:59 Matt's Close Shave with a Crocodile

03:15 Discussion on Crocodile Behavior

05:13 Introduction to the Academic Paper

06:18 Understanding Registered Reports

07:49 Details of the Replication Study

12:07 The Many Babies Study

18:23 Challenges in Developmental Psychology

20:35 Original Study and Replication Efforts

26:27 HARKing and the QRP problem in psychology

34:24 Discussing the Results

36:58 Exploring the Red Ball Experiment

39:38 Forest Plot Analysis

41:19 Infant Preferences and Social Evaluation

43:24 Failure to Replicate the Original Study

47:06 Exploratory Analysis and Moderators

50:03 Interpretations and Implications

54:21 Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Behavior

58:34 Prosocial Evolutionary Speculation

01:05:10 Psychopathic Baby Matt

01:06:28 Concluding Thoughts and Reflections

01:11:20 Comparative Psychology on Snake Hatred!

The full episode is available for Patreon subscribers (1hrs 15 mins).

Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus.
0:29.3	Decoding academia edition, the psychologist Matthew Brown and the amphropologist of sorts, Christopher Kavana.
0:36.8	We're here to look at academic papers, critically about you in them, issues in academia.
0:43.2	And we have, in this instance, Matt, a paper that I suggested, that I recommended for a variety of reasons.
0:52.1	But first, before we get to that, gidday, how you doing?
0:55.4	You all right?
0:56.9	Gide.
0:57.5	Gide.
0:57.8	How's it going?
0:58.3	I'm all right.
0:59.0	I'm all right.
0:59.5	I had a close shave this morning, Chris.
1:02.0	I went for a run because that's what I do these days.
1:05.2	Yeah, the run I was from in the mornings.
1:07.1	Very, very good.
1:08.4	I'm all about maximizing my health.
1:11.0	And afterwards, you know, I walked past my local beach and I went,
1:14.3	I'll get hot and sweaty, I'll go for a swim.
1:15.9	So I stripped off down to my Andes in the water, did some body surfing.
1:21.0	It was very nice.
1:22.0	And I got home.
1:23.5	And my wife mentioned that a formula crocodile had been spotted at that very beach, Chris, a big old salty.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Christopher Kavanagh and Matthew Browne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.