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Development of Human Social Behavior The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science Social behavior occupies a place of paramount importance in the lives of human beings and its development therefore commands attention. Social behavior encompasses a human being’s interaction not only with other persons but also with the world of things, which have acquired their meaning and status from the customs and practices of the culture. The development of social behavior depends on and keeps pace with the development of such biological and psychological processes as maturation, perception, attention, memory, and learning, as these processes are modified by experience. Further, its development depends on the same processes of learning (taken in its broadest meaning) as the development of any other class of behavior, including trial-and-error learning, conditioning and the law of effect, social learning theory with its emphasis on imitation and modeling, and the comprehension of language. Thus, no child, no more than any human being, can behave socially in the absence of motor, cognitive, or linguistic skills. Social behavior is by definition an interactive process; the behavior of any partner to the interaction modifies the behavior of the other person, even as it is being modified by the response of the other person. The interaction begins at birth, hence it may fairly be claimed that the human infant qualifies from birth as a social being. Not only do human infants, requiring constant provision and care, depend for their survival on the ministrations of others, but they are in fact treated as social beings at birth. Mothers and fathers, for example, smile and vocalize to their newborn infants, and an analysis of the speech of hospital personnel to newborns provided ample evidence that even these unrelated persons viewed and treated newborns as fellow human beings. From birth on, the uneven development of the human infants’ sensory and motor systems, compared with the young of many other mammalian species, plays a special role in the development of their social behavior. In their ability to respond to visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli, they resemble precocial animals; in their inability to locomote and so secure nourishment or mingle with other members of their species by their own efforts, they resemble altricial animals. During the long period until effortless locomotion is achieved, what they see and hear, the objects and persons with whom they have contact, as well as the routines of care, are provided by their parents. The gaze, speech, smiles, and other acts of caretakers not only evoke responses from the infants but just as often follow (are contingent on) the infants’ looking at them, smiling, vocalizing, crying, and so on. Development During the First 6 Months Scales of infant development document many early social behaviors. Infants pay attention to people who approach them, show facial brightening and smiles in response to a person who smiles and talks to them, and are quiet when held. Even in the first month or so of life they vocalize in response to another’s vocalizations. By 16 weeks of age they are already initiating social play. They have also learned that their crying brings people to their side, even as people learn what they should do to alleviate the cause. During this early period, infants achieve the major accomplishment of learning to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate, between people and things. Although many objects in the world provide as varied visual and auditory stimulation as do people, people respond more often to the infant’s behavior and, being human, their responses are more variable and less predictable. Especially the faces of people, on which infants fasten very early in life, not only present an ever-changing set of stimuli, but are almost always accompanied by speech appropriate to their own feelings and actions, as well as to those of the infants. It is people, finally, who minister to the infants’ basic biological needs. The infants’ ability to distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar persons constitutes another major accomplishment of these early months. Although infants this young respond positively to all persons, the social responses to familiar persons are more expansive and come more readily. These social accomplishments reveal the infants’ growing perceptual abilities and the presence of a considerable memory. The Second 6 Months The social accomplishments of the infants’ earliest days become richer and more varied as their perceptions deepen, their motor skills improve, and their knowledge increases. They repeat behaviors others laugh at, imitate sounds, and respond to their names. They learn the rules of the game of give-and-take and, whereas at 6 months of age they enjoy playing peek-a-boo, by 12 months of age they are already initiating a number of simple games. About midway in this period infants begin to show distress when separated from their mothers and often from their fathers—a behavior that reaches prominence especially when they are ill or otherwise upset. The phenomenon was labeled separation anxiety by Spitz and described in hospitalized children by James Robertson and John Bowlby. These observations gave rise to the concept of attachment first sketched by Bowlby. Subsequently, attachment was studied empirically by Mary Ainsworth. Although Robert Cairns supplied a straightforward learning theory explanation of the disruption of behavior caused by the removal of familiar stimuli, the reliance of the concept of attachment on psychoanalytic and ethological theory remains strong. As the concept evolved, component behaviors were delineated. The infant’s seeking to maintain proximity to the mother, by staying close or by following her, was proposed as the primary indexing behavior. Then, as everyday observation showed that infants often wandered away at the beck and call of an enticing environment, such behavior was incorporated and labeled exploration from a secure base. The other component behaviors included the aforementioned distress at separation from the mother and the display of fear in the presence of strangers. In a later development, three types of attachment—secure, avoidant, and resistant—were proposed, based on differences in the infants’ responses to the mothers’ return after a series of experimentally manipulated events that ended in the infants’ being left alone in an unfamiliar environment. The nature of the infants’ responses was attributed to differences in the mothers’ sensitivity to the needs of their infants. Attractive as the concept of attachment is, some qualifications are in order. The concept scants the differential contribution to the interaction made by different infants; infants vary as much as caretakers, and both contribute to the interaction. Also, infants are not always cared for exclusively by their mothers, and room must be allowed for attachment to other persons, as first proposed by Rudolph Schaffer and Peggy Emerson. Furthermore, infants not only crawl away from their parents, but do so in most unusual and hence unfamiliar settings (e.g., airports). Even when free to follow a parent, they often stop first to play with toys and on occasion will follow an unknown person. Thus, even for infants, a world of difference lies between a voluntary and a forced separation from loved ones. Finally, although infants may scrutinize unknown persons more intently and do not always smile at unsmiling persons, they do not show fear. Approached playfully or even normally, most infants respond positively. When fearful responses are reported, they have been experimentally produced by socially invasive procedures. As children approach their first birthday, they show unmistakable signs that they are becoming aware of themselves as actors among other actors, signs that suggest the beginnings of a self-concept. Even when infants repeat an act the parents laughed at, a dawning sense of themselves as individuals can be surmised. A similar claim can be made for the behavior, common at about 10 months of age, of the infants’ holding objects out to other persons with the apparent intent of drawing their attention to the object—a behavior followed sometimes now, but always in the second year, by actually giving them objects. Such behavior had long been practiced in the give-and-take game and is so well consolidated in the next few months as to qualify as a gesture of sharing one’s possessions with another. Drawing other persons’ attention to distant objects by pointing with the index finger is a related accomplishment. Now, when they themselves point to interesting spectacles, they also vocalize and look back at the person’s face as though to check that the message is received. Infants, then, recognize other persons not only as separate from themselves, but also as persons with whom they can share an experience. The Child’S Wider Social Environment Even though fathers generally have spent less time with their infants than mothers and have been less responsible for meeting their moment-by-moment needs, what actually does occur during these intermittent interactions is especially highlighted. As actual studies of the nature of the interaction between fathers and infants now reveal, fathers are just as responsive to their newborn infants as mothers. Although fathers are as capable as mothers in ministering to the physical needs of their offspring, and often do so, their style undoubtedly differs from that of mothers. Certainly differences in how mothers and fathers play with their young children have been remarked: Fathers’ play is more physical, including more rough-and-tumble, while mothers’ is more vocal. Yet here as elsewhere, when engaging in comparisons, one fastens on differences and forgets the similarities that greatly outnumber them. Thus, the responses of children to their fathers resemble those to their mothers. As soon as investigators turned their attention to fathers, the larger picture came into view: Members of the family—mother, father, and siblings if present—not only interact with the youngest member of the family in their own individual fashion, but each separate interaction is affected by all the others. The social behavior of the infant and young child develops and is refined in a complex and multifaceted web of social relations. Interestingly, attendance in day-care or nursery school settings does not seem to result in the loss of the emotional bond between children and their parents, which supports the contention that what is important is not the amount of time spent in interactions, but the nature of the interactions. Interactions with Other Children Even very young infants respond as socially to children as to their caretakers. It cannot be supposed that these very young children recognize other children as fellow creatures of their own small size and status. Rather, children being more lively than adults, they present more interesting stimuli, are more often playful, and may be more easily imitated. Siblings, both older and younger, constitute a special class of children, distinguished by their familiarity and even more important by their contribution to the social web of the family. Although rivalry between siblings was vividly portrayed by David Levy in 1937, this does not tell the whole story. Naturalistic and laboratory studies, building on anecdotes, reveal many positive interactions. Older siblings entertain, talk to, and play with their infant siblings. As the infants become toddlers, their siblings help and comfort them, and in turn the younger siblings find their older brothers and sisters attractive models, following where they go and imitating what they do. Unrelated children also engage in congenial social interactions. Even infants smile and reach out to other infants, and older, but still young, children play together, with and without toys, and engage each other in true conversations. Early experience with other children of their own age, as well as with those older and younger, is often considered as important for young children’s social development as association with adults. They learn the rules of a more egalitarian interaction, and by comparing themselves with others of their own age acquire knowledge of their own capabilities—knowledge that contributes to their developing concept of self. Aggressive Behavior Although the play groups of little children conjure up images of a melee of squalling, fighting children, the truth is quite otherwise. Conflicts do occur, usually over the possession of toys, but these are few relative to more positive interactions and are more often resolved by sociable acts than by force. Development of Speech Of the many activities composing the category of social behavior, speech occupies a preeminent position. Not only are newborns spoken to, but throughout the children’s lives almost every subsequent contact with the parents, as well as with all other persons, is accompanied by speech. Even within the first months of life they vocalize in turn, setting the stage for a dialogue, a term that can well stand as a metaphor for all social interactions. While children are very young, adults carry the main burden of the conversation, marking their speech by a lively intonation, many repetitions, and much asking of questions. In turn, the vocalizations of the infant come to resemble the sounds and especially the intonations they hear. By the end of the first year infants have acquired a word or two, and soon thereafter many words, as attentive bystanders label not only the objects and events in the environment but also the infants’ own behavior. The adults’ labeling of the infants’ gestures—in particular, the infants’ pointing to objects—plays an important part in establishing the meaning of their first words. In studies of the semantic and syntactic properties of the child’s speech, its social origins and pragmatic properties tend to be overlooked. The sine qua non of social behavior is communicating with others, and the modes of communicating are many, nonverbal and vocal as well as verbal. The child’s use of the verbal mode, as of the other modes, originates in social interaction and, once acquired, plays a role of increasing importance in all social encounters. Early Acquisition of Prosocial Behavior During the second year of the child’s life a number of behaviors such as comforting, sharing, and helping make their appearance and, with appreciation and reinforcement, develop into socially valued behaviors. These positive behaviors, being common, low-key, and undemanding, tend to go unremarked, posing as they do no problems for parents and teachers. From an early age little children become emotionally upset at the distress of others and offer them sympathy by word and deed. They often spontaneously share their toys and possessions, and the objects they find, with other people and children, both familiar and unfamiliar. In extending such nurturant acts to both animate and inanimate objects, they creatively reenact the care they themselves had experienced at the hands of their parents. Among the prosocial behaviors, obedience to the words of the parents deserves separate attention. Although here, too, more attention has been paid by parents and investigators to incidents when children do not obey, complying with verbal requests is the more common response. In fact, complying begins early and appears to develop without coercion. By the middle of the second year little children carry out many simple commands not only readily but often with pleasure, stemming apparently from their newfound ability to fit their behavior to the words of others. Differences Between Boys and Girls The sex of the child from birth is of paramount consequence to the beholder, if not yet to the child. No question is asked more consistently at the birth of a child than its sex. Although many major attributes studies show no major differences in how parents rear their sons and daughters, nevertheless some do exist. For example, large differences fitting the culture’s stereotypes were found in the type of toys parents provided for their young children. Parents of very young children profess to an intention to treat their children alike regardless of sex; they have been conditioned by a whole lifetime in a culture that has fairly definite ideas about sex-appropriate behavior. Furthermore, by 2 or 3 years of age children come to know, or at least to label, themselves as boys or girls, the first in a series of cognitive stages leading to gender identity sometime between 5 and 7 years of age. Yet in the area of social behavior, no clear evidence has been presented of major differences in the interactions of boys and girls with parents, other adults, or children. Beyond infancy, as children come together in play groups and nursery schools, physical aggression, although on the whole infrequent relative to peaceable interchanges, is seen more often in boys than in girls. Harriet L. Rheingold See also: Affective Development; Bonding and Attachment; Early Childhood Development; Prosocial Behavior. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. APA citation: Development of human social behavior. (2004). In W. E. Craighead, & C. B. Nemeroff (Eds.), The concise Corsini encyclopedia of psychology and behavioral science (3rd ed.). Wiley. 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