Babies have morals

[paximperium]

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?hp

 

[grmcdorman]

Fascinating article, thanks.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Babies have morals

But not molars.

 

[kellyb]

Very interesting.

 

[Wowbagger]

I knew it! "Stephen-Pinker-Style" evolutionary psychology predicted as much! Conventional operant conditioning, alone, would not have done so.

 

[Ziggurat]

But not molars.

I wouldn't be too sure about that, Darth. In fact, I think babies without morals often have molars. Evil toothed babies. And there's more of them out there that we think!

 

[Earthborn]

I knew it! "Stephen-Pinker-Style" evolutionary psychology predicted as much!

Like so much of the research Steven Pinker loves, the controls to rule out learnt behaviour aren't that great.

(Experimental minutiae: What if babies simply like the color red or prefer squares or something like that? To control for this, half the babies got the yellow square as the helper; half got it as the hinderer. What about problems of unconscious cueing and unconscious bias? To avoid this, at the moment when the two characters were offered on the tray, the parent had his or her eyes closed, and the experimenter holding out the characters and recording the responses hadn’t seen the puppet show, so he or she didn’t know who was the good guy and who the bad guy.)

No control is mentioned against the parent unconsciously cueing while watching the show. What also isn't controlled for apparently, is what the child has already learned outside the lab, from the parents or from watching television or whatever.

Differently from what Steven Pinker usually argues for, the article does argue that this baby morality is very rudimentary and that there is a very important role that learning plays in their further development.

 

[Wowbagger]

Differently from what Steven Pinker usually argues for, the article does argue that this baby morality is very rudimentary and that there is a very important role that learning plays in their further development.

No, that is exactly what Steven Pinker argues for: While there is some innate sense of morality, it still needs guidance to shape it into something acceptable to human society.

 

[shawmutt]

I showed the first test to my son a few times. He liked the square better. I guess he's just bad to bone--that's my boy!

 

[paximperium]

I wouldn't be too sure about that, Darth. In fact, I think babies without morals often have molars. Evil toothed babies. And there's more of them out there that we think!

What ever stopped an evil baby from gumming you even when they lack molars?