A project led by Rodolfo Cortes Barragan and Andy Meltzoff aim to empirically investigate the socialization practices of select Indigenous Mexican communities to better understand why and how the character virtue of simpatía is transmitted from parents to children.

Examining childhood socialization in non-Western cultures is critical for expanding scientific understanding of how children develop positive social behaviors. In a recent publication, the team introduced a theoretical model outlining how social experiences and cultural values in Indigenous and non-Indigenous Latin American communities nurture children’s kindness and respect toward others. A central idea is that in interpersonal and group interactions, Indigenous communities emphasize simpatía — a cultural value that prioritizes group harmony, avoiding conflict, nurturing social ties, and exuding joyful sociality toward all people.

The team suggests that simpatía can be nurtured through daily interactions within large, extended, multigenerational Indigenous families and may be transferred intergenerationally. Individual variation in caregivers’ simpatía could be related to individual variation in children’s kindness toward others (what Western scientists call “prosocial behavior”).

The project will study three populations of Indigenous caregivers and their young children, engaging a total of 600 caregiver–child dyads. These include members of the Nahua and P’urhépecha communities from Mexico City and Michoacán, as well as members of the Mexican community in East Los Angeles, where most families have origins in Michoacán. Data will be collected through caregiver questionnaires and experimental tests of children’s behavior administered in Spanish.

Dr. Cortes Barragan, an expert on prosocial development in children of Mexican heritage with deep academic and community ties, and Dr. Meltzoff, a leading researcher on children’s learning with prior TWCF support, will collaborate with researchers and community leaders in Mexico and the U.S.

Primary outputs include study pre-registration, open-access datasets, and peer-reviewed publications, with strong alignment to current Mexican cultural policy initiatives.

Led by Rodolfo Cortes Barragan of University of San Diego & Andy Meltzoff of I-Labs at the University of Washington, this project investigates how the cultural value of simpatía (kindness, selflessness and empathy) is transmitted from caregivers to children in Indigenous Mexican communities.