Culture shapes cognition and motives in early social interactions

In this study, we test the hypothesis that culture shapes cognition and motives in early social interactions. Infants from Ibadan (Nigeria, n = 66, M = 2.2 years, SD = 0.2) and Regensburg (Germany, n = 49, M = 2.3 years, SD = 0.2) were instructed to hand over three objects in two culture-specific ways, by imperatives (e.g., “Give the spoon to me, now!”), being typical for Ibadan, and by requests (e.g., “Could you give me the shoe, please?”), being typical for Regensburg. We found a cultural congruency effect: infants in Ibadan were more responsive to imperatives and infants in Regensburg were more responsive to requests. This response pattern was explained by cross-cultural differences in maternal scaffolding when assigning a task to their infant, which was more assertive (i.e., direct prompts) in Ibadan and more deliberate (i.e., kind requests) in Regensburg. Critically, infants showed higher levels of confusion and protest when confronted with culturally incongruent prompts, unveiling culturally adjusted cognition and motives underlying their response tendencies. These findings highlight the primary role of culturally adjusted parent-child interactions in regulating infants’ social behaviors along culture-specific attractor-states.