Maternal Values and Personality Enhance Infant Cooperation with an Adult

This longitudinal study (N = 204) examines if the association between maternal cooperative values or personality and 14-month-olds’ cooperative ability with an adult experimenter across two tasks is mediated by infant temperament (i.e., biology) or infants’ early at-home cooperative experience through social gameplay at the age of 9 months (i.e., socialisation). The results revealed that infants of mothers with other-oriented cooperative values demonstrated increased coordination and success on the cooperative task requiring complementary actions. Infants of mothers high in cooperative personality traits agreeableness and honesty-humility demonstrated increased coordination and success on the cooperative task involving parallel actions. Neither infant temperament nor the frequency of social gameplay mediated these effects. These findings offer the first evidence suggesting that 14-month-old infants’ cooperative ability is shaped by their parents’ cooperative dispositions.