Foreign saliva scares us off at first. Unless it comes from your own children or other loved ones. Then we overcome our shyness and kiss or lick an ice cream together. And that is a clear signal that even small children understand and interpret as a close relationship. At least that’s what a study by Harvard University’s Ashley Thomas and her team in Science suggests. In short: anyone who doesn’t shy away from spitting must belong to the immediate environment.
To this end, the working group carried out various experiments with five to seven-year-old children, for example with cartoons and with people who played with dolls. The little ones successfully predicted that sharing objects or licking food together only occurs in nuclear families. If it was “only” about friendships, food or toys are shared, but only if they were not “salivated”. But they were also able to discover connections in younger children: Babies and small children at least assume that people who share their saliva with each other help each other in emergency situations.
This goes beyond individual cultures, so it is not just specific to Europeans or Asians, for example, as a study with a larger, economically, geographically and ethnically more diverse sample of small children showed. The exchange of saliva in close relationships is culturally widespread, write Thomas and Co.
“We know that babies notice who is nice to another,” says Thomas. “The most important finding from our study is that infants pay attention not only to people’s characteristics, but also to who is connected to them and how they are connected.”