From this Wynn concludes that infants prefer those "who harm... others" who are unlike them.
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Babies help unlock the origins of morality - Page 3 - CBS News - 0 views
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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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After the Protests - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime
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Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.
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Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.
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Social media can provide a huge advantage in assembling the strength in numbers that movements depend on. Those “likes” on Facebook, derided as slacktivism or clicktivism, can have long-term consequences by defining which sentiments are “normal” or “obvious” — perhaps among the most important levers of change.
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But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.
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Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn't just to challenge power; it's to change it.
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Jason Silva's Captivating Videos Deliver a Dose of 'Techno-Optimism' | Underwire | WIRED - 0 views
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video maker and self-described “philosophical performer” Jason Silva has a much more optimistic (and logically sound) mode of thinking about the future and all the technologically awesome possibilities it has to offer.
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As technology has advanced, it acts as a buffer that shrinks the lag time between what we dream about and what we can create and substantiate in the world.”
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Techno-optimism is a belief in the power of technology to extend our sphere of possibilities, and ultimately a belief that technology helps us solve and transcend problems, limitations and obstacles.
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we should decide that we need to make better tools to solve the problems caused by the initial tools
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The world’s best IT is the alphabet
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it can be used to compose Shakespearean sonnets
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But you can also use the alphabet to compose hate speech
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I’m interested in inspiring people to see the ways in which it has extended our possibilities for the better
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we’re in need of a new narrative. I see my place as somebody who wants to help craft that narrative.
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I begin by deciding on a specific idea I want to ecstatically explore
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the videos are noncommercial, they are meant to be seen as mashups.
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we map out the vibe and the “feeling” we want. We discuss examples, certain placement and “moments” I want to create, and then she sits on it, gets inspired, interprets and plugs it in. Then we discuss and exchange until we’re happy with it.
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Interview in Wired magazine describing an optimistic view of technology, used for good not evil.
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Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views
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I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
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I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
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I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
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For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
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As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
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The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
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“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
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new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
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recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
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we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s
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“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
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the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
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The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
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So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
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Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”
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In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
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The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
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The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
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even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
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The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”
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In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
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their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
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there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
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The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
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I find this the most compelling argument. "Business" has an interest in selling things. Moving us faster, increasing our "seeking" instinct is one of the keys to this consumption frenzy. The individual needs to understand and manage these forces.
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The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
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we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
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As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
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The Art of Focus - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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As Above, So Below: The Worldview of Lynn Margulis | Reality Sandwich - 2 views
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This journey led her to emphasize in all her scientific work two phenomena -- the fusing of distinct beings into a single being: symbiosis; and the interaction of organisms and their environments to create relational "loops" that led to regulation of many Earth systems: Gaia Theory.
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Bacteria were here first and are with us still, comprising a major part of the biosphere. They are unseen with the naked eye, they lack nuclei (for this reason, they are called prokaryotes -- "pro" = before, "karyon" = nucleus). Their forms were legion and their metabolisms were (and continue to be) strange.
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What is known is that the spirochete didn't digest the thermoplasmid and the thermoplasmid did not digest the spirochete. As Margulis was fond of saying, "1 + 1 = 1." There was a union of the two, resulting in an entirely new being. They were inseparable, literally. The thermoplasmid had a rotor now, and the spirochete had a "head".
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Margulis, inspired by the work of little-known biologists, revealed and proved these mergers for us. At first, her worked was rejected and scoffed at. It did not fit the still-dominant neo-Darwinian paradigm that tells us all evolutionary novelty comes from natural selection acting on genes and the gradual accumulation of random genetic mutation. But eventually these symbioses were accepted because they could not be ignored
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our physical selves are universes composed of the movemenst, biological agreements, and interactions of these beings.
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"Identity is not an object; it is a process with addresses for all the different directions and dimensions in which it moves..." Margulis once stated, with her colleague Ricardo Guerrero.
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Indeed, symbiogenesis has been observed in the lab. An amoeba population, accidentally infected with bacteria was observed over long periods of time, and soon enough, the infecting bacteria could not be removed from the infected amoeba without killing the organism.
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Gaia is the work of the relational loops of push and pull between bacteria, other organisms, and the environment
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But Lovelock came up with an understandable and accesible metaphor in the form of a computer program called Daisyworld. Daisyworld is not the "proof" of Gaia: Lovelock and his colleague Andrew Watson devised the program to see if living and environmental factors could theoretically interact without intention.
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"Gaia," Margulis's former student Greg Hinkle said, "is just symbiosis as seen from space."
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Gaia processes are real and observable (and sometimes referred to as "biogeochemistry", a term more acceptable to mainstream science). Furthermore, the five kingdoms (bacteria, protoctists, fungi, plants, animals) of life are all touched by symbiosis
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After she found James Lovelock, they worked on making those processes known. Their collaboration resulted in Gaia Theory, which was a disciplinary symbiosis -- the theoretical expression of Margulis's interdisciplinary life.
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All animals have symbiotic partners in their guts. Remove these symbionts and the animals die.
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Microcosmos show us a bacterial view of the world. Bacteria exchange their genes laterally. This means they don't pass their genomic information only when they reproduce (though this can happen), but also through their simple existence.
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Along with the many detailed examples of bacterial mergers at varying levels of cellular complexity, the world revealed by Acquiring Genomes is also a world of mating between distinct phyla
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What is definite is that the merging of beings is key, and symbiogenesis offers a clearly observable alternative to the consistent but woefully incomplete neo-Darwinian paradigm.
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David Bohm, who said
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"Science is the search for truth...whether we like it or not."
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Many neo-Darwinist concerns circled nervously around words like "Gaia" and "cooperation" (which Margulis did not like to use). They were, perhaps rightly, concerned that these terms were ripe for religious appropriation. But Margulis herself was outspoken against such mishandling of her research.
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it's much more complex than that -- there is something "in it" for every symbiont,
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"Gaia is not merely an organism." The Earth is beyond stale conception. It is more magnificent and active than we can imagine. Gaia is object and process.
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this complexity is impossible to incorporate in a linear and reductive understanding.
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This is a question that I often wonder - how different thinkers (using different modes of understanding) come to different conclusions. What is it that separates the linear (reductive) thinker from the holistic (systemic) thinker?
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If Gaia is conscious, it possesses a consciousness of a different magnitude, probably of a different order all together.
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Perhaps as we -- in the newly and deeply connected world of the internet, social profiles, and globalization -- witness the dissolution of the cult of isolated individuality and embark on understanding a clearer and more nuanced view of individuality, so to will we ready ourselves for a clearer view of evolution and life.
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This is a good question; how does this connected world reframe our conception of ourselves as individuals? Can we, at once, become humbled while we contribute? Can we imagine ourselves as less important while we excel in our pursuits?
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Dawkins, who claims to be an atheist, relies on a host of selfish angels within us and the possibility for meme-salvation to justify his theory. He substantiates his magical worldview on a meager past of scientific work.
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To encompass complex systems with our thinking, we must imagine a model that is less like "cause-effect" more like "being-manifestation." That is, multiple layers and numerous agents of forces unconsciously conspire together, and their conspiring is so intermingled, that it is simultaneously cause and effect, and thus beyond both.
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Now that Margulis has died, it remains our choice to catch up with what she and her life's work have set in motion. To do so, we must bring together the many fields of knowledge she embodied. Biologists must talk to physicists, virologists must talk to geologists, cosmologists must talk to microbiologists, and scientists musty talk to non-scientists. This motion of meeting and exchanging ideas, if we act with it, will evolve our thinking.
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" Now that Margulis has died, it remains our choice to catch up with what she and her life's work have set in motion. To do so, we must bring together the many fields of knowledge she embodied. Biologists must talk to physicists, virologists must talk to geologists, cosmologists must talk to microbiologists, and scientists musty talk to non-scientists. This motion of meeting and exchanging ideas, if we act with it, will evolve our thinking. "
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The Evolution of Cooperation* - 1 views
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To find a good strategy to use in such situations, I invited experts in game theory to submit programs for a computer Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament – much like a computer chess tournament.
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the winner was the simplest of all candidates sub- mitted. This was a strategy of simple reciprocity which cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move. Using an American colloquial phrase, this strategy was named Tit for Tat.
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face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can recognize and adapt to your pattern of action.
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data from these tournaments reveals four properties which tend to make a strategy successful: avoidance of unnecessary con- flict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the
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What made this mutual restraint possible was the static nature of trench warfare, where the same small units faced each other for extended periods of time. The soldiers of these opposing small units actually violated orders from their own high commands in order to achieve tacit cooperation with each other
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the individuals involved do not have to be rational: The evolutionary process allows successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. Nor do they have to exchange messages or commit- ments: They do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: The use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not needed: Successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: Cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing
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An indefinite number of interactions, therefore, is a condition under which cooperation can emerge
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This condition is especially important in the case of egoists. Relationship over time.
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So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: The strategy cooperates on the first move, and discriminates between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not
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The check for reciprocation is a bit of evidence that the other side knows the value of the move of cooperation; that they won't be abandoned.
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Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other
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It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled-for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay.
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The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship.
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Waiting for probes to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble.
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I have found that testing limits is a factor in working with children and adults. We are alert to the boundaries.
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For this reason, the only arms control agreements which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate
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Therefore, the advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: Don’t be envious, don’t be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don’t be too clever.
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We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation
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Herein lies another key... that we have a cooperative (win-win) attitude and understanding of the "game". We see our survival as tied with not exclusive of the fate of the "other".
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We are used to thinkingabout competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such asfootball or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range ofsituations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutualdefection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but ineliciting their cooperation
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shared by mesbah095 on 03 Apr 14
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Guest Post Online - 0 views
guestpostonline.com
Creative Commons Cooperation Infotention RSS Yahoo pipes augmentation Personal learning network twitter literacy commons game theory meditation neuroscience thinking tools learning culture
shared by mesbah095 on 03 Apr 14
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Article Writing & Guestpost You Can Join this Site for Your Article & guest post, Just Easy way to join this site & total free Article site. This site article post to totally free Way. Guest Post & Article Post live to Life time only for Current & this time new User. http://guestpostonline.com
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Mission for week two: Evolution of cooperation questions (ACTION REQUESTED) | Social Me... - 0 views
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Pavel's
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a lot of smart people across the region also begin to identify themselves with one of the sides, inevitably getting involved in arguments they don't want to be part of, raising hostility towards each other.
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ake control over our pre-wired responses.
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awareness (such as meditation)
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help people learn how to identify and de-identify with various groups, by allowing them to experience the variety of social contexts.
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Roland's
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not only be critical thinking but systems thinking
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help people become more self-dependent.
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experiences are organized for children from the early age
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raise the level of critical thinking
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Education is liberating.
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The notion of indirect reciprocity could be important here: doing things for those groups without expecting to get a return, but setting an example
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reject the notion of tribes or of people being permanently and essentially bad and extremist, and to be welcoming and kind
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Bodil's
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I can work with other communities which are open, tolerant and welcoming.
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Better distribution of resources.
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reputation and trust
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know how to build trust and create cooperation, we should know something about breaking bad patterns
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knowledge about social dilemmas
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“growth mindset”
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David's
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separating fiction from fact,
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interaction in order to reveal the "true" characteristics of inform
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physical security, enough to eat, a place to sleep, freedom from threat.
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John's
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little can be done at the level of the individual, other than being aware that our appreciation of ideas, and our tendency to engage in counterproductive behavior may be due to forces other than the ideas themselves.
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becoming aware of our own weaknesses with regard to absorbing new information
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it is possible to gather individuals into a super organism that is less vulnerable to being victimized by false or misleading information,
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we need access to information and skill in critical thinking
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Hermano's
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My political answer is internationalism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalism_(politics).
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High level of material, political, physical, psychological etc personal independance
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My cultural answer is to displace the ubiquitous narrative of competition by this narrative of cooperative
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traces of trustworthiness online,
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tactical tool is the internet.
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empowers the common man to act at multiple levels, assuming responsibility for all the nested groups to which he would belong.
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Inger's
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Fighting discrimination
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stereotypes
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negative stereotypes
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experience the feeling of discrimination in order to fight it.
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Discrimination starts with stereotypes that turn into prejudice, and the individual becomes a member of a group that is dehmanised and stripped of human qualities.
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Elena's
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Meditation skills
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life satisfaction
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transferring an ultimate level of governance and common legislation to structures above nation states
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Practices of integration of spirit-mind-body
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value of own life and personal voe not to destroy self
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Calisa's
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only possible escape route is to get a glimpse of life on the outside, to see that there are different ways to live one's life, to understand that there are choices.
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only through the glimpse can the child even begin to contemplate the notion of breaking the "pre-wiring"
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glimpse does not guarantee escape
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shine your light brightly:
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If there are children in your life, invest in them
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Sahil's
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Stay informed about the big, complex world-shaping issues
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Use technology to express yourself beyond your home and workplace
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same forces producing the 'dark' forms of social cooperation mentioned above - compliance, conformance, solidarity - are perhaps the same forces behind 'good' cooperation.
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continually trying to re-imagine our 'imagined communities'
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the more connected we are, the more we'll be forced to recognize others' interests as our own.
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might include: cultural traits and norms based on morality (i.e. religion), integration of market economies, promoting greater free-flow of people/ideas, promoting denser urban centers, open access to information, monogamy??, anti-nepotism norms, cooperative higher institutions (with ability to manage laws/reputations/punishment).
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Luis'
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We are “pre-wired” to cooperate within our tribe
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impact of group identity
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“manifold and profound”
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make group identity salient
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redefining the boundaries of the group to include more people is the best opportunity for change
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Once you include everyone in the group, you find ways to encourage interactions among both sub-groups,
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narcos manage to stay loyal and cooperate within their cartel when competing against other cartels with equally loyal members.
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discourage cooperation inside the cartel groups
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Assurance game, because one narco will only fight if the other fights, and will defect if the other defects
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The key issue in the Assurance Game is whether we can trust each other.
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shared by David McGavock on 25 May 14
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Shame and honour drive cooperation - 0 views
rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/...rsbl.2011.0367.full
cooperation Jennifer Jacquet shame honor game theory
shared by David McGavock on 25 May 14
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Shame is a traditional deterrent from asocial behaviour and is employed when offenders are singled out for public scorn.
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Modern democratic societies have moved away from including the public in the punishment, although in some cases (e.g. drunk driving licence plates) the state still sanctions shame [1].
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shame as well as honour could become more prevalent as digital technology
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We designed this public goods experiment to isolate the effects of being shamed or honoured, with no monetary consequences to either experience, and test whether the expectation of negative or positive reputational information enforces social behaviour.
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If players know that only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, will they cooperate more as a group?
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In games that offer players anonymity, uncooperative behaviour is more prevalent [7] while the opposite is true of games in which players know that each of their decisions will be linked to their real identities [8–10]
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confirming that, even when only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, players cooperate more as a group
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expected that shame might be more effective than honour
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n contrast to our expectations, we found no significant differences in group contributions over the first 10 rounds between the shame and honour treatments.
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We hypothesized that the threat of shame or the prospect of honour would lead to increased public contributions.
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Our results show that a promise to single out free-riding individuals for public scrutiny can lead to greater cooperation from the whole group, as can singling out the most generous individuals.
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Group cooperation in the shame treatment significantly declined following round 10 (paired t-test between 10th and 12th round, t = 3.67, p = 0.005), corroborating our finding that the threat of being singled out as a free rider had been driving cooperation.
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Cues of being watched enhance cooperation [11] and when humans lived in small groups, it was easy to observe individual behaviour.
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language, replaced direct observation
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the absence of shaming by the state does not preclude the absence of shame altogether in society, especially as social media increases the frequency, speed and inclusiveness of communication.
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The Internet increasingly creates a global town square where controls are harder to implement and enforce, gossip travels fast, and where shame as well as honour therefore might experience resurgence.
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Transparency also enhances cooperation [8–10] but can be costly to provide and its use can be limited. Transparency requires time evaluating and determining a satisfactory performance.
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difficult in our current era, where human attention, not information, is a scarce resource [15].
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Interesting distinction; that attention is in shorter supply than information.
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Babies help unlock the origins of morality - CBS News - 0 views
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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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Web Literacy Map - 1.1.0 - Mozilla Webmaker - 0 views
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"Web Literacy Map (1.1.0) The Web Literacy Map is a map of competencies and skills that Mozilla and our community of stakeholders believe are important to pay attention to when getting better at reading, writing and participating on the web."
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Babies help unlock the origins of morality - Page 2 - CBS News - 0 views
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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 06 May 14
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Are Babies Born Good? | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views
www.smithsonianmag.com/...are-babies-born-good-165443013
babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation Smithsonian
shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14
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The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there.
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“When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,” Charles Darwin wrote in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” his classic study of his own son.
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Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.
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“People who’ve spent their whole careers studying perception are now turning toward social life, because that’s where the bio-behavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road,” Konner says. “Natural selection has operated as much or more on social behavior as on more basic things like perception. In our evolution, survival and reproduction depended more and more on social competence as you went from basic mammals to primates to human ancestors to humans.”
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The lab’s initial study along these lines, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays, 6- and 10-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” “This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action,” the authors wrote. It “may form an essential basis for...more abstract concepts of right and wrong.”
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spate of related studies hinting that, far from being born a “perfect idiot,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, or a selfish brute, as Thomas Hobbes feared, a child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and seems predisposed to care about other people.
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No seasoned parent can believe that nurture doesn’t make a difference, or that nature trumps all. The question is where the balance lies.
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Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says.
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Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s.
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she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down.
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When I visited, Tasimi was recreating versions of Hamlin’s puppet shows as background work for a new project.
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The child shot her a woebegone look before dutifully hauling himself out of the ball pit, picking up the pen and returning it to the researcher.
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When babies at the Yale lab turn 2, their parents are tactfully invited to return to the university after the child’s third birthday.
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The next lab I visited was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has made this age group something of a specialty, through work on toddler altruism (a phrase that, admittedly, rings rather hollow in parental ears).
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One advantage of testing slightly older babies and children is that they are able to perform relatively complicated tasks. In the Laboratory for Developmental Studies, the toddlers don’t watch puppets help: They themselves are asked to help.
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Warneken was initially interested in how little children read the intentions of others, and the question of whether toddlers would assist others in reaching their goals. He wanted to sound out these behaviors in novel helping experiments—“accidentally” dropping a hat, for instance, and seeing if the kids would return it.
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prominent psychologists had previously argued that children are selfish until they are socialized; they acquire altruistic behaviors only as childhood progresses and they are rewarded for following civilization’s rules, or punished for breaking them.
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One day he and a toddler were bouncing a ball together. Truly by accident, the ball rolled away—“the moment of serendipity,” as Warneken now calls it. His first impulse was to retrieve the toy and carry on, but he stopped himself.
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The little boy watched him struggle, then after a moment heaved himself up, waddled over to the toy and—defying the scientific community’s uncharitable expectations—stretched out his own chubby little arm to hand the ball to his gigantic playmate.
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In the following months, Warneken designed experiments for 18-month-olds, in which a hapless adult (often played by him) attempted to perform a variety of tasks, to no avail, as the toddlers looked on. The toddlers gallantly rescued Warneken’s dropped teaspoons and clothespins, stacked his books and pried open stubborn cabinet doors so he could reach inside.
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videotaped experiment of a toddler wallowing in a wading pool full of plastic balls.
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But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
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Because they were manifested in 18-month-olds, Warneken believed that the helping behaviors might be innate, not taught or imitated. To test his assumption, he turned to one of our two nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
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The first chimps Warneken studied, nursery-raised in a German zoo
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as the caretaker dropped the first object: As if on cue, the chimp bounded over and breezily handed it back.
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Warneken wondered if perhaps human-reared chimps had been conditioned to be helpful to their food providers
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They would consistently help when the person was reaching for the object,” even in the absence of any payoff.
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The final step was to see if chimps would assist each other. So Warneken rigged apparatuses where one caged chimp could help a neighbor reach an inaccessible banana or piece of watermelon. There was no hope of getting a bite for themselves, yet the empowered chimps fed their fellow apes regardless.
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But under what circumstances are toddlers altruistic?
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Some recent chimp studies suggest that chimps won’t help others unless they witness the dismay of the creature in need. Are human children likewise “reactive” helpers, or can they come to another’s assistance without social cues?
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“You can see the birth of this proactive helping behavior from around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age,” Warneken explains. “The children don’t need solicitation for helping. They do it voluntarily.” Proactive helping may be a uniquely human skill.
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Criticisms of the “nice baby” research are varied, and the work with the youngest kids is perhaps the most controversial.
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such methodological worries are never far from baby researchers’ minds.
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Other critics, meanwhile, fault the developmental philosophy behind the experiments.
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these researchers argue, but actually they start from scratch with only senses and reflexes, and, largely through interaction with their mothers, learn about the social world in an astonishingly short period of time.
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And still other scientists think the baby studies underestimate the power of regional culture.
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Ideas of the public good and appropriate punishment, for instance, are not fixed across societies: Among the Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon, where Henrich works, helping rarely occurs outside of the immediate household, if only because members of the tribe tend to live with relatives.
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Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.
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Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head.
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Perhaps babies are not really trying to help in a particular moment, per se, as much as they are expressing their obliging nature to the powerful adults who control their worlds—behaving less like Mother Teresa, in a sense, than a Renaissance courtier. Maybe parents really would invest more in a helpful child, who as an adult might contribute to the family’s welfare, than they would in a selfish loafer—or so the evolutionary logic goes.
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A different interpretation, Warneken says, is that in a simpler world maybe toddlers really could help, pitching in to the productivity of a hunter-gatherer group in proportion to their relatively meager calorie intake.
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For many researchers, these complexities and contradictions make baby studies all the more worthwhile.
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“I’m trying to think of a lesser-of-two evils study,” he says. “Yes, we have our categories of good and bad, but those categories involve many different things—stealing $20 versus raping versus killing. Clearly I can’t use those sorts of cases with, you know, 13-month-olds. But you can come up with morality plays along a continuum to see...whether they form preferences about whether they like the guy who wasn’t as bad as the other bad guy.”
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"The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."
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In the original study, conducted by Yale researchers in 2007, groups of 6-month-olds and 10-month-olds watched a puppet show with neutral wooden figures, where one figure, the climber, was trying to get up a hill. In one scenario, one of the other figures, called the helper, assisted the climber up the hill. In the other scenario, a third figure, called the hinderer, pushed the climber down. Babies were then presented with the helper and hinderer figures so they could pick which one they preferred, and 14 out of 16 babies in the older group (10 months old) and all 12 of the 6-month-olds picked the helper. The study, which was published in the journal Nature, seemed to imply that infants could be good judges of character. [In Photos: How Babies Learn]
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discrepancies would seem to make it tricky for infants to know that the climber needed help, and if they did, for them to know that the helper was helping. As such, it's possible the infants in the new study looked to these other variables (collisions and bounces) to make their decisions, Hamlin suggests.
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Even if flaws did exist in their study, Hamlin and her colleagues point to various independent studies, one of which uses a similar setup without the "bouncing" of the climber, that support the "babies have a moral compass" theory. The researchers go on to note they have replicated their findings, that infants prefer prosocial others, in a range of social scenarios that don't include climbing, colliding or bouncing. Hamlin's other studies have shown babies are good judges of character.
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"On the help and hinder trials, the toys collided with one another, an event we thought infants may not like," lead researchers Damian Scarf said in a statement from New Zealand's University of Otago. "Furthermore, only on the help trials, the climber bounced up and down at the top of hill, an event we thought infants may enjoy."
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"An experiment five years ago suggested that babies are equipped with an innate moral compass, which drives them to choose good individuals over the bad in a wooden puppet show. But new research casts doubt on those findings, demonstrating that a baby's apparent preference for what's right might just reflect a fondness for bouncy things."
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Babies help unlock the origins of morality - Page 4 - CBS News - 0 views
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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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how culture drove human evolution
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cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.
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but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.
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or a long time was that status in humans was just a kind of human version of this dominant status
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Chimps, other primates, have dominant status.
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social status
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second kind of status. We call this status prestige.
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from being particularly knowledgeable or skilled in an area,
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From this we've argued that humans have two separate kinds of status, dominance and prestige
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give them deference in exchange for knowledge that you get back
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you want to isolate the members of your group who are most likely to have a lot of this resources, meaning a lot of the knowledge or information that could be useful to you in the future
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some of the big questions are, exactly when did this body of cumulative cultural evolution get started?
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may have started early
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another possibility is that it emerged about 800,000 years ago.
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here's theoretical models that show that culture, our ability to learn from others, is an adaptation to fluctuating environments.
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Another signature of cultural learning is regional differentiation and material culture, and you see that by about 400,000 years ago
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400,000 years ago
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there's another possibility that it was a different kind of ape that we don't have in the modern world: a communal breeding ape that lives in family units rather than the kind of fission fusion you might see in chimpanzees
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In the Pliocene, we see lots of different kinds of apes in terms of different species of Australopithecus.
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we now have evidence to suggest that humans were communal breeders, so that we lived in family groups maybe somewhat similar to the way gorillas live in family groups, and that this is a much better environment for the evolution of capacities for culture than typical in the chimpanzee model
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for cultural learning to really take off, you need more than one model.
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trying out different technique
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take advantage of the variation
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the question is, how did we become such long distance runners?
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only humans have it
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humans who don't know how to track animals, can't run them down
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idea being that the religions of modern societies are quite different than the religions we see in hunter gatherers and small scale societies
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Most recently I've been also thinking about the evolution of societal complexity.
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when societies begin to get big and complex
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large-scale cooperation
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What are the causal processes that bring these things about?
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There's an interaction between genes and culture. First you have to get the culturally transmitted knowledge about animal behavior and tracking and spore knowledge and the ability to identify individuals, which is something you need to practice, and only after that can you begin to take advantage of long distance running techniques
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I've worked in a couple of different areas on this, and one is religion.
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there was an intense period that continues today of intergroup competition, which favors groups who have social norms and institutions that can more effectively expand the group while maintaining internal harmony
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they've been shaped in ways that galvanize cooperation in larger groups
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In small-scale hunter-gatherer religions, the gods are typically whimsical. They're amoral.
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but as we begin to move to the religions in more complex societies, we find that the gods are increasingly moralizing.
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if you remind believers of their god, believers cheat less, and they're more pro social or fair in exchange tasks,
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more pro social in are the ones with anonymous others, or strangers. These are the kinds of things you need to make a market run to have a successful division of labor
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ritual plays a role in this
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rituals seem to be sets of practices engineered by cultural evolution to be effective at transmitting belief and transmitting faith
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elevate the degree of belief in the high-moralizing gods
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high-moralizing gods will often require rituals of this kind
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Speaking in unison, large congregations saying the same thing, this all taps our capacity for conformist transmission;
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People also engage in what we call credibility-enhancing displays [during rituals]. These are costly things. It might be an animal sacrifice or the giving of a large sum of money or some kind of painful initiation rite
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We think religions are just one element, one way in which culture has figured out ways to expand the sphere of cooperation and allow markets to form and people to exchange and to maintain the substantial division of labor.
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There's a lot of risk in developing specialization because you have to be confident that there's a market there that you can engage with. Whereas if you're a generalist and you do a little bit of farming, a little bit of manufacturing, then you're much less reliant on the market. Markets require a great deal of trust
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In the intellectual tradition that I'm building on, culture is information stored in people's heads that gets there by some kind of social learning
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We tend to think of cultural transmission, or at least many people think of cultural transmission as relying on language
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, it's quite clear that there is a ton of cultural transmission that is just strictly by observational learning.
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what we don't see amongst other animals is cumulative cultural evolution.
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you can learn one thing from one generation, and that begins to accumulate in subsequent generations.
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One possible exception to that is bird song.
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One of the interesting lines of research that's come out of this recognition is the importance of population size and the interconnectedness for technology.
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looking at a case study in Tasmania.
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You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania's actually connected to mainland Australia so it's just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it's at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn
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You can show that this is the kind of thing you'd expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they're learning from the most successful member
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study by Rob Boyd and Michelle Kline
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larger islands had much bigger and more complex fishing technologies, and you can even show an effective contact. Some of the islands were in more or less contact with each other,
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more in contact, you have fancier tools, and that seems to hold up.
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rates of innovation should continue to increase, especially with the emergence of communication technologies
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As an individual inventor or company, you're best off if everybody else shares their ideas but you don't share your ideas because then you get to keep your good ideas, and nobody else gets exposed to them, and you get to use their good ideas, so you get to do more recombination.
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An important thing to remember is that there's always an incentive to hide your information.
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Embedded in this whole information-sharing thing is a constant cooperative dilemma in which individuals have to be willing to share for the good of the group.
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a norm of information sharing is a really good norm to have
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I've done a lot of work on marriage systems with the evolution of monogamy.
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Eighty-five percent of human societies have allowed men to have more than one wife
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pushes us towards polygyny
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But in the modern world, of course, monogamy is normative, and people who have too many wives are thought poorly of by the larger society. The question is, how did this ever get in place?
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European Marriage Pattern,
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Athens legislates the first rules about monogamous marriage
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people are ready to moralize it,
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it does seem to have societal level benefits. It reduces male-male competition. We think there's evidence to say it reduces crime, reduces substance abuse, and it also engages males in ways that cause them to discount the future less and engage in productive activities rather than taking a lot of risks
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If I talk about normative monogamy as being successful, I mean that it spread,
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especially if you have a society with widely varying amounts of wealth, especially among males. Then you're going to have a situation that would normally promote high levels of polygyny
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to get into the mating and marriage market you would have to have a high level of wealth if we were to let nature take it's course
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Part of my program of research is to convince people that they should stop distinguishing cultural and biological evolution as separate in that way. We want to think of it all as biological evolution.
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Culture is part of our biology.
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We now have the neuroscience to say that culture's in our brain, so if you compare people from different societies, they have different brains.
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Cognition and our ability to think are all interwoven,
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A good example of this is the placebos. Placebos are something that depend on your cultural beliefs. If you believe that something will work, then when you take it, like you take an aspirin or you take a placebo for an aspirin, it initiates the same pathways as the chemically active substance. Placebos are chemically inert but biologically active, and it's completely dependent on your cultural beliefs.
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One of the large research projects that I run in an effort to understand human sociality is called The Root of Human Sociality Project.
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at the time to something called the Ultimatum Game, and the Ultimatum Game seemed to provide evidence that humans were innately inclined to punish unfairness.
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behavioral economists find that students give about half, sometimes a little bit less than half, and people are inclined to reject offers below about 30 percent
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The older you get, even if you have more wealth and more income, you're especially inclined to only offer half, and you'll reject offers below 40 percent.
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I was thinking that the Machiguenga would be a good test of this
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I did it in 1995 and 1996 there, and what I found amongst the Machiguenga was that they were completely unwilling to reject, and they thought it was silly. Why would anyone ever reject?
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they made low offers, the modal offer was 15 percent instead of 50, and the mean comes out to be about 25 percent.
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over the next two summers these field anthropologists went to the field and conducted the ultimatum game as well as a few other games
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we found is that societies vary dramatically, from societies that would never reject, to societies that would even reject offers above 50 percent, and we found that mean offers ranged across societies from about 25 percent to even over 50 percent. We had some of what we called hyper fair societies. The highest was 57 percent in Lamalera, Indonesia.
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able to explain a lot of the variation in these offers with two variables. One was the degree of market integration.
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there seemed to be other institutions, institutions of cooperative hunting seemed to influence offers.
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measured market integration much more carefully
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subsequent project
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large number of other variables, including wealth, income, education, community size, and also religion.
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did the Ultimatum Game along with two other experiments. The two other experiments were the Dictator Game (the Dictator Game is like the Ultimatum Game except the second player doesn't have the option to reject) and the Third Party Punishment Game.
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Third Party Punishment Game, there are three players and the first two players play a Dictator Game.
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This gives us two different measures of willingness to punish strangers
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one is rejection in the Ultimatum Game
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three measures of fairness
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size of the community predicts willingness to punish
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suggesting that if you have small communities, you don't need punishment.
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It could be some kind of reputational mechanism
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There's a number of different ways to create norm systems that operate like that.
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In a big society punishment can be most effective because reputational mechanisms can be weak. If you're in a big society and you encounter somebody, you probably don't have friends in common through which you could pass reputational information for which punishment could be generated. You might want to punish them right on the spot or someone who observes the interaction might want to punish them right on the spot or call the authorities or whatever, which is also costly.
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This creates a puzzle because typically people think of small-scale kinds of societies, where you study hunter-gatherers and horticultural scattered across the globe (ranging from New Guinea to Siberia to Africa) as being very pro social and cooperative.
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but the thing is those are based on local norms for cooperation with kin and local interactions in certain kinds of circumstances
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these norms don't extend beyond food sharing. They certainly don't extend to ephemeral or strangers
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large-scale society run you have to shift from investing in your local kin groups and your enduring relationships to being willing to pay to be fair to a stranger.
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if you're going to be fair to a stranger, then you're taking money away from your family.
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A commitment to something like anti-nepotism norms is something that runs against our evolutionary inclinations and our inclinations to help kin
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In this sense, the norms of modern societies that make modern societies run now are at odds with at least some of our evolved instincts.
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Lately we've been focused on the effects of religion
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adherence to a world religion matters
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People from world religions were willing to give more to the other person in the experiment, the anonymous stranger
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Part of this is your willingness to acquire a norm of impartial roles; that we have a set of rules that governs this system.
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political scientists call it the rule of law
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those rules apply independently of the identities
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If you want the rule of law to spread or to be maintained, you need conditions in which you're managing risk.
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[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution-and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it.
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Tuning and feeding our personal learning networks is where the internal and the technological meet the social.
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Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters
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More and more, knowing where to direct your attention involves a third element, together with your own attentional discipline and use of online power tools – other people
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