Daniel Benjamin Moritz Haun
Biographic Data
| ID | 105675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Benjamin Moritz Haun |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel Benjamin Moritz |
| FAMILY NAME | Haun |
| SIGNATURE | HAUN D B M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3262-645X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Cognitive change without linguistic change: The rise of egocentric frames of reference in the Hai||om
Human cultures differ in how they think about space: some primarily use egocentric frames of reference, thinking about space in relation to the body, while others privilege geocentric frames, thinking about space in relation to the environment. The origins of this cognitive diversity remain largely unknown. Here, we provide evidence suggesting an ongoing shift in spatial thinking-but not language-within a culture, providing insight into the origi…
Parenting culture: A multimethod perspective on parenting practices among the Nso, Cameroon
Parenting behaviors are studied through various qualitative and quantitative methods, including observations, interviews, and questionnaires, to identify both culturally specific and universal patterns of parents' interactions with their offspring. However, these methods have rarely been combined to systematically investigate methodological convergence and divergence in capturing parenting dynamics. The present study employs a mixed method approa…
Investigating the social functions of hurt feelings in middle childhood
Expressions of hurt feelings are assumed to serve an important social function: communicating that a transgression needs to be repaired. This message is accompanied by a threat to withdraw affection which may motivate the transgressing individual to repair-by increasing interpersonal distance and eliciting feelings of guilt. We investigated the development of this social function of hurt feelings expressed as sulking behavior in direct contrast t…
Social connectedness without eye contact: 18- But Not 9-Month-Olds Use Proximal Touch to Infer Third-Party Joint Attention During Observational Learning
Decades of research have highlighted the important role of joint attention in early cultural learning. However, most previous studies focused on a limited range of joint attention settings involving the learner's first-person participation in joint visual attention, characterized by eye contact and triadic gaze following. This has created an incomplete picture, tending to neglect the diversity in which infants experience social connectedness in t…
Combining remote and collaborative research: A critical reflection on large-scale, comparative, and interdisciplinary research in times of a global crisis
This paper examines the methodological and ethical challenges of conducting remote research on child-animal relationships across thirty communities in 17 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It critically assesses remote research as a mode of collaboration informed by decolonial aspirations, highlighting the complexities of navigating temporal and geographical distances, mitigating global inequalities, and addressing political and methodologic…
Choosing to help others at a cost to oneself elevates preschoolers' body posture
Young children sometimes help others at a cost to themselves, but little is known about the emotional mechanisms underlying this behaviour. Here, 5-year-old children (n = 96, 45 girls, mean age = 5.57 years, SD = 1.79 months, range = 5.19 years to 5.9 years, families recruited from a local database based in a medium-sized German city) were engaged in one task and then asked either to help (child-helps) or watch (child-watches) an adult complete a…
Social reward predicts false belief understanding in Namibian Hai||om children
Social motivation is theorized to promote Theory of Mind development in childhood, but research testing this link is scarce and largely limited to urban middle‐class milieus of the Global North. Here, we investigated the link between social motivation (i.e., social reward responsivity) and Theory of Mind (i.e., false belief understanding) among N = 59 Hai||om children ( Age Range = 2.3–8.0 years) from rural Namibia, an indigenous community where …
Evolution of Humanity: English Translation of the Original Essay by Kinji Imanishi. Including Commentaries by Contemporary Scholars
In 1952, Kinji Imanishi wrote a thought-provoking essay on the nature of animal societies. In this essay, he applied the concept of human culture (which he referred to as Karuchua ) to nonhuman animals by giving different taxa a voice in a fable-like conversation, thereby aptly transcending speciesism. While thoroughly inspiring for scholars who have mastered the Japanese language, the essay was only known to non-Japanese-speakers by its English …
Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts
Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children ( N = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk …
Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate
Cumulative cultural evolution has been claimed to be a uniquely human phenomenon pivotal to the biological success of our species. One plausible condition for cumulative cultural evolution to emerge is individuals' ability to use social learning to acquire know-how that they cannot easily innovate by themselves. It has been suggested that chimpanzees may be capable of such know-how social learning, but this assertion remains largely untested. Her…
Direct and Observed Joint Attention Modulate 9-Month-Old Infants’ Object Encoding
Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), N = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task…
Testing Causal Effects of Empathy on Children’s Prosociality in Politeness Dilemmas - An Intervention Study
Empathy is commonly considered a driver of prosociality in child ontogeny, but causal assumptions regarding this effect mostly rely on correlational research designs. Here, 96 urban German children (5–8 years; 48 girls; predominantly White; from mid-to-high socioeconomic backgrounds) participated in an empathy intervention or a control condition before prosocial behaviors (polite lie-telling: rating the drawing as good; prosocial encouragement: u…
Simulating peers: Can puppets simulate peer interactions in studies on children's socio-cognitive development
Interactions with peers are fundamental to socio-cognitive development, but assessing peer interactions in standardized experiments is challenging. Therefore, researchers commonly utilize puppetry to simulate peers. This Registered Report investigated urban German children's (AgeRange = 3.5–4.5 years; N = 144; 76♀) mind ascriptions and social cognition to test whether they treat puppets like peers, adults, or neither. Children attributed less min…
What isn't social tolerance ? The past, present, and possible future of an overused term in the field of primatology
In the past four decades, the term social tolerance has been utilized to describe, explain, and predict many different aspects of primates' sociality and has been measured with a large range of traits and behaviors. To date, however, there has been little discussion on whether these different phenomena all reflect one and the same construct. This paper opens the discussion by presenting the historical development of the term social tolerance and …
The Austronesian Game Taxonomy: A cross-cultural dataset of historical games
Humans in most cultures around the world play rule-based games, yet research on the content and structure of these games is limited. Previous studies investigating rule-based games across cultures have either focused on a small handful of cultures, thus limiting the generalizability of findings, or used cross-cultural databases from which the raw data are not accessible, thus limiting the transparency, applicability, and replicability of research…
Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age
This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants’ visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.5- to-11-month-olds (n = 20) looked longer than 7- to-8.5-month-olds (n = 20) at videos showing two adults interacting with one another when simultaneously presented with a scene showing two adults acting individuall…
Developing a Coding System for Sulking Behavior in Young Children
Children’s sulking behavior is a salient yet understudied emotional phenomenon. It has been hypothesized to result from hurt feelings, humiliation, and anger, and might thus function as a nonverbal measure in the behavioral studies of these emotions. We conducted three studies that served to develop a comprehensive coding system for children’s sulking behavior. The first study explored sulking features in an online survey that used parental and t…
Social interaction targets enhance 13‐month‐old infants' associative learning
Infants are attentive to third‐party interactions, but the underlying mechanisms of this preference remain understudied. This study examined whether 13‐month‐old infants ( N = 32) selectively learn cue–target associations guiding them to videos depicting a social interaction scene. In a visual learning task, two geometrical shapes were repeatedly paired with two kinds of target videos: two adults interacting with one another (social interaction) …
Sulking behavior and the emergence of hurt feelings in young children
When do hurt feelings develop? The emotion of feeling hurt is vital for close relationships because it signals that one has been devalued illegitimately, potentially eliciting guilt and the motivation to repair in the partner. We approached the question of when hurt feelings develop by studying the emergence of sulking behavior as an indicator of hurt feelings. In an online‐questionnaire study, parents and teachers hypothesized that children begi…
Observing others’ joint attention increases 9-month-old infants’ object encoding
In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old typically developing infants from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds from urban Germany (N = 32, 13 f…
Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison
Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative motivations underlying conformity, as well as intracultural variability in their age patterns. We measured …
The ontogeny of exploratory object manipulation behaviour in wild orangutans
In human infants, exploratory object manipulation is a major vehicle for cognitive stimulation as well as an important way to learn about objects and basic physical concepts in general. The development of human infants' exploratory object manipulation follows distinct developmental patterns. So far, the degree of evolutionary continuity of this developmental process remains unclear. We investigated the development of exploratory object manipulati…
Social inclusion increases over early childhood and is influenced by others’ group membership
This study examined preschoolers' social inclusion-the active involvement of new partners into social interactions-in different intergroup contexts. Using an interactive paradigm, 3- to 5-year-old German children played a ball-tossing game with 2 puppets in which 1 puppet initiated the game with the child and another approached the game. In Study 1 ( N = 144), the initiator was from an ingroup while an outgroup puppet approached the game (ingroup…
Human emotional vocalizations can develop in the absence of auditory learning
Are emotional expressions shaped by specialized innate mechanisms that guide learning, or do they develop exclusively from learning without innate preparedness? Here we test whether nonverbal affective vocalisations produced by bilaterally congenitally deaf adults contain emotional information that is recognisable to naive listeners. Because these deaf individuals have had no opportunity for auditory learning, the presence of such an association …
Being observed increases overimitation in three diverse cultures
From a young age, children in Western, industrialized societies overimitate others' actions. However, the underlying motivation and cultural specificity of this behavior have remained unclear. Here, 3- to 8-year-old children (N = 125) from two rural Namibian populations (Hai||om and Ovambo) and one urban German population were tested in two versions of an overimitation paradigm. Across cultures, children selectively imitated more actions when the…
Children’s respect for ownership across diverse societies
Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children participated in a resource task with a peer-partner, where we established ownership by assigning children to on…
Chimpanzees use social information to acquire a skill they fail to innovate
Cumulative cultural evolution has been claimed to be a uniquely human phenomenon pivotal to the biological success of our species. One plausible condition for cumulative cultural evolution to emerge is individuals' ability to use social learning to acquire know-how that they cannot easily innovate by themselves. It has been suggested that chimpanzees may be capable of such know-how social learning, but this assertion remains largely untested. Her…
The ontogeny of exploratory object manipulation behaviour in wild orangutans
In human infants, exploratory object manipulation is a major vehicle for cognitive stimulation as well as an important way to learn about objects and basic physical concepts in general. The development of human infants' exploratory object manipulation follows distinct developmental patterns. So far, the degree of evolutionary continuity of this developmental process remains unclear. We investigated the development of exploratory object manipulati…
Being observed increases overimitation in three diverse cultures
From a young age, children in Western, industrialized societies overimitate others' actions. However, the underlying motivation and cultural specificity of this behavior have remained unclear. Here, 3- to 8-year-old children (N = 125) from two rural Namibian populations (Hai||om and Ovambo) and one urban German population were tested in two versions of an overimitation paradigm. Across cultures, children selectively imitated more actions when the…
Mealtime conversations between parents and their 2-year-old children in five cultural contexts
Children all over the world learn language, yet the contexts in which they do so vary substantially. This variation needs to be systematically quantified to build robust and generalizable theories of language acquisition. We compared communicative interactions between parents and their 2-year-old children ( N = 99 families) during mealtime across five cultural settings (Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Germany, and Japan) and coded the amount of talk …
Why Cross-Cultural Psychology Is Incomplete Without Comparative and Developmental Perspectives
We argue that comparing adult behavior and cognition across cultures is insufficient to capture the multifaceted complexity of cultural variation. We champion a multidisciplinary perspective that draws on biological and psychological theory and methods. We provide examples for ways in which cross-cultural, developmental, and comparative studies might be combined to unravel the interplay between universal species-typical behaviors and behavioral v…
Evolution of Humanity: English Translation of the Original Essay by Kinji Imanishi. Including Commentaries by Contemporary Scholars
In 1952, Kinji Imanishi wrote a thought-provoking essay on the nature of animal societies. In this essay, he applied the concept of human culture (which he referred to as Karuchua ) to nonhuman animals by giving different taxa a voice in a fable-like conversation, thereby aptly transcending speciesism. While thoroughly inspiring for scholars who have mastered the Japanese language, the essay was only known to non-Japanese-speakers by its English …
Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison
Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative motivations underlying conformity, as well as intracultural variability in their age patterns. We measured …
Social inclusion increases over early childhood and is influenced by others’ group membership
This study examined preschoolers' social inclusion-the active involvement of new partners into social interactions-in different intergroup contexts. Using an interactive paradigm, 3- to 5-year-old German children played a ball-tossing game with 2 puppets in which 1 puppet initiated the game with the child and another approached the game. In Study 1 ( N = 144), the initiator was from an ingroup while an outgroup puppet approached the game (ingroup…
Returning the tables: Language affects spatial reasoning
Can language restructure cognition? The case for space
Categorical perception of emotional facial expressions does not require lexical categories
Does our perception of others' emotional signals depend on the language we speak or is our perception the same regardless of language and culture? It is well established that human emotional facial expressions are perceived categorically by viewers, but whether this is driven by perceptual or linguistic mechanisms is debated. We report an investigation into the perception of emotional facial expressions, comparing German speakers to native speake…
The development of tag-based cooperation via a socially acquired trait
Conformity in nonhuman primates: Fad or fact?
Population-level variability in the social climates of four chimpanzee societies
Recent debates have questioned the extent to which culturally-transmitted norms drive behavioral variation in resource sharing across human populations. We shed new light on this discussion by examining the group-level variation in the social dynamics and resource sharing of chimpanzees, a species that is highly social and forms long-term community associations but differs from humans in the extent to which cultural norms are adopted and enforced…
Comparative and Developmental Anthropology
The persistent sampling bias in developmental psychology: A call to action
Cognition, Comparative
Comparative cognition is a field of enquiry that aims to research cognition by comparing its characteristics across animal species. Cross‐species comparisons can separate cognitive skills that are widely shared across species from those that are rare or even unique to any particular species. Comparisons across species can also help researchers to understand which factors drive the evolution of cognition. If humans are included in the list of comp…
Conformity
Conformity refers to individuals adjusting their opinion and/or behavior to match the majority of group members. As a psychological phenomenon, conformity has been studied in the context of social influence theories, where it is typically equated with persuasion by a majority of confederates expressing an erroneous opinion. In terms of adaptive learning strategies, in models exploring processes of cultural evolution, “conformity” has been operati…
Why Cross-Cultural Psychology Is Incomplete Without Comparative and Developmental Perspectives
We argue that comparing adult behavior and cognition across cultures is insufficient to capture the multifaceted complexity of cultural variation. We champion a multidisciplinary perspective that draws on biological and psychological theory and methods. We provide examples for ways in which cross-cultural, developmental, and comparative studies might be combined to unravel the interplay between universal species-typical behaviors and behavioral v…
Human emotional vocalizations can develop in the absence of auditory learning
Are emotional expressions shaped by specialized innate mechanisms that guide learning, or do they develop exclusively from learning without innate preparedness? Here we test whether nonverbal affective vocalisations produced by bilaterally congenitally deaf adults contain emotional information that is recognisable to naive listeners. Because these deaf individuals have had no opportunity for auditory learning, the presence of such an association …
Being observed increases overimitation in three diverse cultures
From a young age, children in Western, industrialized societies overimitate others' actions. However, the underlying motivation and cultural specificity of this behavior have remained unclear. Here, 3- to 8-year-old children (N = 125) from two rural Namibian populations (Hai||om and Ovambo) and one urban German population were tested in two versions of an overimitation paradigm. Across cultures, children selectively imitated more actions when the…
Children’s respect for ownership across diverse societies
Ownership is a cornerstone of many human societies and can be understood as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals refrain from taking each other's property. Owners can thus trust others to respect their property even in their absence. We investigated this principle in 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 152) from 4 diverse societies. Children participated in a resource task with a peer-partner, where we established ownership by assigning children to on…
Social inclusion increases over early childhood and is influenced by others’ group membership
This study examined preschoolers' social inclusion-the active involvement of new partners into social interactions-in different intergroup contexts. Using an interactive paradigm, 3- to 5-year-old German children played a ball-tossing game with 2 puppets in which 1 puppet initiated the game with the child and another approached the game. In Study 1 ( N = 144), the initiator was from an ingroup while an outgroup puppet approached the game (ingroup…
The Austronesian Game Taxonomy: A cross-cultural dataset of historical games
Humans in most cultures around the world play rule-based games, yet research on the content and structure of these games is limited. Previous studies investigating rule-based games across cultures have either focused on a small handful of cultures, thus limiting the generalizability of findings, or used cross-cultural databases from which the raw data are not accessible, thus limiting the transparency, applicability, and replicability of research…
Infants’ Preference for Social Interactions Increases from 7 to 13 Months of Age
This study examined 7-to-13.5-month-old middle-class Western infants’ visual orienting to third-party interactions in parallel with their social attention behavior during own social interactions (Leipzig, Germany). In Experiment 1, 9.5- to-11-month-olds (n = 20) looked longer than 7- to-8.5-month-olds (n = 20) at videos showing two adults interacting with one another when simultaneously presented with a scene showing two adults acting individuall…
Developing a Coding System for Sulking Behavior in Young Children
Children’s sulking behavior is a salient yet understudied emotional phenomenon. It has been hypothesized to result from hurt feelings, humiliation, and anger, and might thus function as a nonverbal measure in the behavioral studies of these emotions. We conducted three studies that served to develop a comprehensive coding system for children’s sulking behavior. The first study explored sulking features in an online survey that used parental and t…
Social interaction targets enhance 13‐month‐old infants' associative learning
Infants are attentive to third‐party interactions, but the underlying mechanisms of this preference remain understudied. This study examined whether 13‐month‐old infants ( N = 32) selectively learn cue–target associations guiding them to videos depicting a social interaction scene. In a visual learning task, two geometrical shapes were repeatedly paired with two kinds of target videos: two adults interacting with one another (social interaction) …
Sulking behavior and the emergence of hurt feelings in young children
When do hurt feelings develop? The emotion of feeling hurt is vital for close relationships because it signals that one has been devalued illegitimately, potentially eliciting guilt and the motivation to repair in the partner. We approached the question of when hurt feelings develop by studying the emergence of sulking behavior as an indicator of hurt feelings. In an online‐questionnaire study, parents and teachers hypothesized that children begi…
Observing others’ joint attention increases 9-month-old infants’ object encoding
In direct interactions with others, 9-month-old infants' learning about objects is facilitated when the interaction partner addresses the infant through eye contact before looking toward an object. In this study we investigated whether similar factors promote infants' observational learning from third-party interactions. In Experiment 1, 9-month-old typically developing infants from mixed socioeconomic backgrounds from urban Germany (N = 32, 13 f…
Conformity decreases throughout middle childhood among ni-Vanuatu children: An intracultural comparison
Multiple studies have shown that children conform to majorities in perceptual judgment tasks against their better knowledge. However, these studies report contradictory results about how conformity develops over age. Here, we study variation in conformity over the course of middle childhood: we examined potential informational and normative motivations underlying conformity, as well as intracultural variability in their age patterns. We measured …
The ontogeny of exploratory object manipulation behaviour in wild orangutans
In human infants, exploratory object manipulation is a major vehicle for cognitive stimulation as well as an important way to learn about objects and basic physical concepts in general. The development of human infants' exploratory object manipulation follows distinct developmental patterns. So far, the degree of evolutionary continuity of this developmental process remains unclear. We investigated the development of exploratory object manipulati…
What isn't social tolerance ? The past, present, and possible future of an overused term in the field of primatology
In the past four decades, the term social tolerance has been utilized to describe, explain, and predict many different aspects of primates' sociality and has been measured with a large range of traits and behaviors. To date, however, there has been little discussion on whether these different phenomena all reflect one and the same construct. This paper opens the discussion by presenting the historical development of the term social tolerance and …
Direct and Observed Joint Attention Modulate 9-Month-Old Infants’ Object Encoding
Sharing joint visual attention to an object with another person biases infants to encode qualitatively different object properties compared to a parallel attention situation lacking interpersonal sharedness. This study investigated whether merely observing joint attention amongst others shows the same effect. In Experiment 1 (first-party replication experiment), N = 36 9-month-old German infants were presented with a violation-of-expectation task…
Psychology (34 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Developmental psychology (23 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (17 works) · Cognitive psychology (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Cognition (8 works) · Geography (6 works)