Baby understands people bond when they share spit

Babies nine months and older immediately conclude that people are in a close relationship when they see that they share spit, for example by kissing, sharing an orange or drinking from each other’s glasses. This is evident from experiments with American subjects reported this week by a team of psychologists led by Ashley Thomas (Harvard University). in Science. The research builds on recent insights that around the world, people who are close to each other seem to touch and kiss each other much more and use each other’s cutlery more easily.

The young children, aged between 9 and 18 months, were first shown a play between a doll and two actresses, in which the doll ate (and thus shared spit) the same orange with one woman and threw a ball with the other. If afterwards the doll went into despair, the children looked first and longer at the woman with whom spit had been shared, evidently because they expected that the doll would be the first to come to the aid of the doll. That it really is spit was shown by a variant of the experiment in which an actress first extended her finger in her own mouth and then in the mouth of the doll – with the same results. A play where an actress touched her forehead and that of the doll did not raise expectations from the small children.

Global Disgust

In a comment in Science Psychologist Christine Fawcett (Uppsala University) notes that this interpretation of spit sharing is consistent with the fact that sharing spit with a stranger actually evokes great disgust in people. This disgust exists worldwide and is probably innate. Whether the positive assessment of spitting up in close relationships really exists worldwide and is more or less innate remains to be seen, writes Fawcett. Children can also simply learn that connection, she thinks, and then the phenomenon could differ per culture.

It was already known that young children have a kind of intuitive psychological insight: they take into account whether someone is nice or helpful, for example. But with this research, children also appear to be equipped with an intuitive sociology, the researchers write in Science. Not surprising, because young children also live in an environment in which different kinds of relationships exist, from ‘thick’ – as those close ties are called in English lingo – to very superficial. Previously was also already established that nine-month-old babies can see if people are talking kindly to each other and conclude that those people will work well together later on.

Contempt or anger

It seems unlikely that children only use the use of spit as a clue to draw conclusions about these close relationships. Those close relationships are characterized by all kinds of physical behaviors, such as comfort, trust and touching the genitals, as the researchers cite as examples. And sharing spit can also be very contrary to a close relationship, for example if someone spits on another person’s face in contempt or anger. Whether the children can make a distinction in this has not been investigated, but it is not inconceivable that they can deduce this from the emotional context.

Older children, between the ages of five and seven, can use language to indicate how they feel about spit, according to simple tests by the same research team, with questions about comic strips. A sister is more likely to drink through the same straw than a girlfriend, the children indicated. But a child will share toys with that girlfriend just as easily as with those sisters, they think. Parents who were asked about this also appeared to share that opinion. They said they were okay with sharing cutlery, kissing, etc. within the family, but not outside of it.