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shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached

It's a question people have asked for as long as there have been people: are human beings inherently good? Are we born with a sense of morality or do we arrive blank slates, waiting for the world to teach us right from wrong? Or could it be worse: do we start out nasty, selfish devils, who need our parents, teachers, and religions to whip us into shape?
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The philosopher Rousseau considered babies "perfect idiots...Knowing nothing,"
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for most of its history, her field agreed.
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discovered seemingly simple ways to probe what's really going on in those adorable little heads.
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Babies, even at three months, looked towards the nice character and looked hardly at all, much, much, much shorter times, towards the unhelpful character.
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shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached

Study after study after study, the results are always consistently babies feeling positively towards helpful individuals in the world. And disapproving, disliking, maybe condemning individuals who are antisocial towards others.
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first published their findings about baby morality in the journal "Nature" in 2007, and they've continued to publish follow-up studies in other peer-reviewed journals ever since
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babies seem to view the ball thief "as deserving punishment."
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do you think that babies, therefore, are born with an innate sense of justice?
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What seems to be an ignorant and unknowing baby is actually a creature with this alarming sophistication,
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What we're finding in the baby lab, is that there's more to it than that -- that there's a universal moral core that all humans share. The seeds of our understanding of justice, our understanding of right and wrong, are part of our biological nature.
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shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached

The youngest kids in the study will routinely choose to get fewer prizes for themselves just to get more than the other kid
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Around age 8, they start choosing the equal, fair option more and more. And by 9 or 10, we saw kids doing something really crazy --
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-- deliberately giving the other kid more.
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Paul Bloom: When we have these findings with the kids, the kids who choose this and not this, the kids in the baby studies who favor the one who is similar to them, the same taste and everything-- none of this goes away. I think as adults we can always see these and kind of nod.
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And so it seems we're left where we all began: with a mix of altruism, selfishness, justice, bigotry, kindness. A lot more than any of us expected to discover in a blob.
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shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached

From this Wynn concludes that infants prefer those "who harm... others" who are unlike them.
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We are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues, and that, to some extent, is the dark side of morality.
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Karen Wynn: I think, we are built to, you know, at the drop of a hat, create us and them.
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Lesley Stahl: Sounds to me like the experiment show they are little bigots. Paul Bloom: I think to some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias.
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