The stock image shows a baby and father. Babies judge the relationship between two people by saliva sharing, according to new research.
The images are freemixer.
Young babies know that two people must have a close relationship if they are willing to swap saliva.
Babies who are 8 to 10 months old seem to know that kissing on the mouth, sharing a spoon, and licking ice-cream cones only happen when people have an intimate relationship.
Babies and young children are able to understand the complexity of their social world from a very young age, thanks to little experience with these things. They can distinguish between different kinds of cooperative relationships.
Who do babies look to first?
After watching puppet shows for babies and toddlers, Thomas and her colleagues came to a conclusion.
A woman is rolling a ball with a blue fuzzy puppet. A woman puts a slice of orange in her mouth and the puppet nibbles on the slice, then she puts the orange back in her own mouth.
Both of these interactions are friendly and pro-social, but taking bites off the same food suggests a more intimate relationship than simply playing ball.
The two women with the blue fuzzy puppet are shown in the video to see if infants made this distinction. The puppet starts to cry and put its head down.
When the puppet cried, infants and toddlers looked first at the woman who had eaten the orange and then at the puppet.
"They're looking in that direction because they expect something to happen there," says Thomas. They expect the woman to be the one to respond to the puppet's distress.
Babies and young children looked at both women equally when they were shown a puppet that cried. This suggested that they didn't see this particular food-sharing woman as helpful; instead, their relationship with the puppet was more important.
To make sure that sharing of food didn't make babies infer a close social connection, the researchers created another video. Instead of sharing an orange slice, a woman put her finger in her own mouth and then put it in a purple puppet's mouth.
A woman touched a green puppet on its forehead and then touched her own forehead. The video showed a woman in distress, with purple and green puppets looking on.
Babies and toddlers looked at the purple puppet that had the more intimate, finger-in-the-mouth interaction, as if expecting it to be more affected by the woman's concern.
The older children were told about another child who was sharing stuff. The scientists never explicitly referred to spit, but some of the sharing involved contact with saliva.
"We said, 'This kid is eating applesauce with a spoon and he shares his applesauce with one of these two people using his spoon.' Who are you certain he shared with? The choices were always between a family member and a friend.
Kids thought a person was more likely to share with a friend than a family member if they had separate pieces of candy or toys.
"But when it comes to saliva-sharing items, like sharing an ice cream cone or using the same spoon, then kids think that the kid is more likely to share with family," says Thomas.
Social glue is created by saliva.
Other researchers are interested in the results.
"These findings illuminate what young children understand about the social structures around them but also spark further questions regarding how children come to acquire these expectations and how universal they might be," writes Christine Fawcett of Uppsala University in Sweden in a commentary that was published along with this new study.
She notes that the idea of exchanging saliva with a stranger can create feelings of disgust, but that people will happily do this with those close to them, even pet dogs.
There could be an evolutionary pressure to suppress disgust with bodily substances to aid in taking care of babies, and infants' experience of this kind of caretaking could then lead to a learned expectation that such behavior is associated with close proximity.
Alan Fiske believes that babies have an innate understanding of social relationships. He wrote that humans are born with four fundamental forms of relationships and that this study is important.
Sharing saliva is a way of connecting bodies, or making bodies the same in some respect, in relationships characterized by communal sharing. That's the most important thing. When people feel like they are the same, almost in an embodied way, then they feel the same.
Fiske says that spit sharing is one instance of connecting bodies physically through bodily substances. Sex, breastfeeding, and even mingling blood are some of the ways in which to become a "blood brother." He notes that the ritual of communion in Christianity involves taking the body and blood of Jesus Christ as a way for that religion to express and reinforce a communal sharing relationship.
Fiske says that this kind of close relationship can be created in other ways, such as grooming, snuggling and hugging, or dancing or marching.
Babies seem to know all this innately. He believes that future studies will show that babies will initiate their own behaviors in order to forge relationships with others, even if they only observe these activities to understand the social links of those around them.
"They know how to hug and cuddle, and they know how to feed you, and they like to do those things," says Fiske. They feed the people that they love. They cuddle with the people they love.
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