Authors: Paul Bloom
In another set of studies, the psychologists Kristine Onishi and Renee Baillargeon showed that
fifteen-month-olds can anticipate a person’s behavior on the basis of his or her false belief. Babies watched as an adult looked at an object in one box, then observed the object move to another box while the adult’s eyes were covered. Later on, they expected the adult to reach into the original box, not the box that actually contained the object. This is a sophisticated psychological inference, the sort of rich understanding of other minds that most psychologists used to believe only four- and five-year-olds were capable of.
Early in life, then, we are social animals, with a foundational appreciation of the minds of others.
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study that got me started doing research into the moral life of babies wasn’t designed to look at morality at all. It was intended to explore the sophistication of babies’ social understanding. My colleagues and I were interested in whether babies could accurately predict how individuals would respond to someone who was either kind or cruel to them. In particular, we asked whether babies understand that individuals tend to approach those who have helped them and avoid those who have harmed them.
This is a good place to note that all of the baby studies I have been involved in are carried out in the Yale Infant
Cognition Center, which is run by my colleague (and wife) Karen Wynn. These experiments are always done in collaboration with Karen and her team of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows.
Before I get into our findings, I’ll give you a general sense of how this research takes place at the lab. A typical experiment takes about fifteen minutes and begins with the parent carrying his or her baby into a small testing room. Most of the time the parent sits on a chair with the baby on his or her lap, though sometimes the baby is strapped into a high chair with the parent standing behind. At this point, some of the babies are either sleeping or too fussy to continue; on average this kind of study ends up losing about a quarter of the participants. Just as critics describe much of experimental psychology as the study of the American college undergraduate who wants beer money, there’s some truth to the claim that a lot of developmental psychology is the study of the interested and alert baby.
In our initial study, led by a then–postdoctoral fellow, Valerie Kuhlmeier, we needed to show babies nice and nasty interactions. The most obvious nasty interaction is one individual hitting another, but we worried that some parents—and possibly the Yale Human Subjects Committee—wouldn’t be comfortable with having the babies watch violent interactions. We decided, then, to draw upon
previous work by the psychologists David Premack and Ann Premack, who showed babies animated movies where one object either helped another squeeze through a gap or blocked another from getting through a gap. Their
findings suggested that the babies viewed the helping acts as positive and the hindering acts as negative.
Based on this research,
we created animations in which geometrical figures helped or hindered one another. For example, a red ball was shown trying to go up a hill. In some instances, a yellow square went behind the ball and gently nudged it up the hill (helping); in others, a green triangle went in front of it and pushed it down (hindering). Next the babies saw movies in which the ball either approached the square or approached the triangle. This allowed us to explore their expectations about how the ball would act in the presence of these characters.
We found that nine- and twelve-month-olds look longer when the ball approaches the character that hindered it, not the one that helped it. This effect was robust when the animated characters had eyes, making them look more like people, which supports the notion that these were bona fide social judgments on the part of the babies. (If the individuals had no eyes, the looking-time patterns flipped for the twelve-month-olds, and the effect disappeared for nine-month-olds—they looked at each scenario for the same amount of time.) This understanding seems to emerge at some point between six and nine months: a later study, using three-dimensional characters with faces, replicated the finding with a new sample of ten-month-olds but found no effect for six-month-olds.
These studies explore babies’ expectations about how characters would act toward the helper and the hinderer, but they don’t tell us what babies themselves think about
the helper and the hinderer. Do they have a preference? From an adult perspective, the helper is a mensch and the hinderer is a jerk. In a series of experiments led by then–graduate student Kiley Hamlin, we asked whether babies have the same impression.
Our first set of studies used three-dimensional geometrical objects manipulated like puppets instead of animations. (It might seem odd that we used objects instead of real people, but babies and toddlers are often unwilling to approach adult strangers.) And instead of using looking-time measures, which are ideal for exploring babies’ expectations, we adopted reaching measures, which are better for determining what babies themselves prefer. The scenarios were the same as those used in the previous experiment: a ball was either helped up a hill or pushed down the hill. Then the experimenter placed the helper and the hinderer on a tray to see which one the baby would reach for.
(Some experimental details: to ensure that the babies were responding to the actual scenario, and not just to the colors and shapes of the different objects, we systematically varied who was the helper and who was the hinderer—for instance, half the babies got the red square as the helper; half got the red square as the hinderer. Another concern was unconscious cueing: if the adults around the baby knew who the good guys and bad guys were, they might somehow convey this information. To get around this problem, the experimenter holding out the characters didn’t see the puppet show and so didn’t know the “right” answer; also, the baby’s mother closed her eyes at the moment of choice.)
As we predicted, six- and ten-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all of the babies reached for the good guy.
Such a result is open to three interpretations. Babies might be drawn to the helpful individual, they might be repelled by the hindering individual, or both. To explore this, we introduced a new character that neither helped nor hindered. We found that, given a choice, infants preferred a helpful character to this neutral one and preferred this neutral character to one who hindered, indicating that babies were both drawn to the nice guy and repelled by the mean guy. Again, these results were not subtle; babies almost always showed this pattern of response.
We then followed this up with a pair of studies looking at three-month-olds. Now, babies at that age really are sluglike; they can’t control their reaching well enough to be tested with our usual method. But we noticed something with the older babies that gave us a clue as to how to proceed. Upon analyzing the video clips, we found that they didn’t just reach for the helping character; they also looked toward the helping character. This suggested that for the younger babies we could use their direction of looking as a proxy for preference. When we showed the babies the two characters simultaneously, the effect was robust: the three-month-olds clearly preferred to look at the good guys.
In a second study introducing the neutral character, we got an interesting pattern of success and failure. Like the six- and ten-month-olds, the younger babies looked longer
at a neutral character than at a hinderer. But they did not favor the helper over the neutral character. This is consistent with a
“negativity bias” so often found in adults and children: sensitivity to badness (in this case, the hinderer) is more powerful and emerges earlier than sensitivity to goodness (the helper).
Our initial helper/hinderer studies were published in the journal
Nature
and generated a lot of discussion, both enthusiastic and skeptical. Our more critical colleagues worried that maybe babies weren’t actually responding to the goodness/badness of the interaction but rather to some nonsocial aspect of the scene. We worried about the same thing ourselves, and our experiments had certain features that we hoped would exclude this possibility. We tested babies in other scenarios in which the “climber” was replaced with an inanimate block that didn’t move on its own. The helper and hinderer went through the very same physical movements, but now they weren’t actually helping or hindering. The substitution caused the babies’ preference to disappear, which suggests that babies were indeed responding to the social interactions, not merely the movements.
Also, in
a project led by Mariko Yamaguchi, then an undergraduate in Karen’s lab, the research team retested the children who had been tested years ago in the original studies led by Valerie Kuhlmeier, where they had predicted the behavior of a ball who was either helped or hindered. It turned out that their performance on the original helper/hinderer experiment (but not their performance on other tasks) was related to their social reasoning skills as
four-year-olds. This too suggests that the helper/hinderer experiments really do tap babies’ social understanding.
Still, it was important to see whether the same results would ensue if we moved away from the original helper/hinderer scenarios, so
Kiley and Karen created different sets of morality plays to show the babies. In one of these, an individual struggled to lift the lid on a box. On alternating trials, one puppet would grab the lid and open it all the way, and another puppet would jump on the box and slam it shut. In another scenario, an individual would play with a ball, and the ball would roll away. Similarly, one puppet would roll the ball back, and another puppet would grab it and run away. In both situations, five-month-olds preferred the good guy—the one who helped to open the box, the one who rolled the ball back—to the bad guy.
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experiments suggest that babies have a general appreciation of good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of interactions, including those that the babies most likely have never seen before. Now, we certainly haven’t proven that the understanding that guides the babies’ choices actually counts as moral. But the baby responses do have certain signature properties of adult moral judgments. They are disinterested judgments, concerning behaviors that don’t affect the babies themselves. And they are judgments about behaviors that adults would describe as good or bad. Indeed, when we showed the very same scenes to toddlers and asked them, “Who was nice? Who was good?” and “Who was mean? Who was bad?” they responded as
adults would,
identifying the helper as nice and the hinderer as mean.
I think that we are finding in babies what philosophers in the Scottish Enlightenment described as a moral sense. This is not the same as an impulse to do good and avoid doing evil. Rather, it is the capacity to make certain types of judgments—to distinguish between good and bad, kindness and cruelty.
Adam Smith, though himself skeptical of its existence, describes the moral sense as “somewhat analogous to the external senses. As the bodies around us, by affecting these in a certain manner, appear to possess the different qualities of sound, taste, odour, colour; so the various affections of the human mind, by touching this particular faculty in a certain manner, appear to possess the different qualities of amiable and odious, of virtuous and vicious, of right and wrong.”
I think that we naturally possess a moral sense, and I’m going to return to this point over and over in the pages that follow. But morality involves much more than a capacity to make certain distinctions. It entails certain feelings and motivations, such as a desire to help others in need, compassion for those in pain, anger toward the cruel, and guilt and pride about our own shameful and kind actions. We have considered so far the head; what about the heart?
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People could not be moral without the capacity to tell right from wrong. But if we want to explain where moral actions come from—why we sometimes behave kindly and altruistically, instead of cruelly and selfishly—this moral sense is not enough.
To see why, imagine a perfect—perfectly rotten—psychopath. He is blessed with high intelligence, good social skills, and some of the same motivations that normal people possess, such as hunger, lust, and curiosity. But he lacks a normal response to the suffering of others and is missing as well feelings such as gratitude and shame. Because of
some unhappy combination of genes, parenting, and idiosyncratic personal experience, he is without moral sentiments.
Our psychopath need not be a moral imbecile. He could possess the simple capacities we talked about in the last chapter. Even as a baby psychopath, he might prefer an individual who helps someone up a hill over someone
who pushes the character down. And as he grows up, he will learn the rules and conventions of his society. Our psychopath knows that it is “right” to rescue a lost child and “wrong” to sexually assault a woman while she is unconscious. But he doesn’t feel any of the associated moral emotions, so his appreciation of right and wrong is similar to that of someone blind from birth who can state that grass is “green” and that the sky is “blue”—factually correct knowledge without the usual experiences that go with it.
Imagine trying to convince your psychopath to be kind to other people. You might tell him that he needs to repress selfish impulses for the sake of others. You could throw some philosophy at him, presenting the view of utilitarian philosophers that we should act to increase the sum total of human happiness, or going on about Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, or John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, or Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. You might try
a strategy that parents often use with their children and ask him how he would feel if someone behaved toward him as he often behaves toward others.
He could respond to all of this that he simply doesn’t care about increasing the amount of human happiness and has no interest in the categorical imperative, or any of the rest of it. He appreciates the logical equivalence between him harming another individual and another individual harming him—he’s not an idiot, after all. But, still, none of this motivates him to treat people with kindness.