A study has revealed that babies are born with the ability to discern good from evil, and make moral judgments by the age of six months.
A US study, pioneered by a team of psychologists at the infant cognition centre at Yale University in Connecticut, shows that babies’ sense of moral code may be instilled in the brain at birth. It reveals that infants can even act as judge and jury in the nursery.
Researchers, who studied morality in babies for years, asked one-year-old babies to take away treats from a ‘naughty’ puppet found they were sometimes also leaning over and smacking the figure on the head.
Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist who headed the study, said:
‘A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.
‘With the help of well designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bones.’
Kiley Hamlin, a co-author of the study, said people worry a lot about teaching children the difference between good and bad but ‘this might be something that infants come to the world with’.
For one study, babies aged between six months and a year were shown a puppet show in which a simple, colourful wooden shape with eyes tries to climb a hill.
At some point the shape is helped up the hill by a second toy, while other times a third character pushes it down.
After watching the show several times, depending on the individual powers of concentration, the babies were directed to pick between the ‘good guy’ square, and the ‘bad guy’ triangle. They showed a clear preference for the helpful toys – spending far longer looking at the ‘good’ shapes than the ‘bad’ ones.
In another experiment the babies were shown a toy dog puppet attempting to open a box, with a friendly teddy bear helping the dog, and an unfriendly teddy thwarting his efforts by sitting on him. After watching several times the babies were given the opportunity to choose one of the teddy bears. The majority chose the helpful teddy.
In a third experiment five-month-old-babies watched one rabbit puppet trying to snatch a ball from a toy cat while a second rabbit puppet tried to return it. Again, most of the babies chose the helpful one. When the test was repeated with 21-month-old babies they were asked to take a treat from one of the rabbits. Most took the treat from the unhelpful rabbit, and one even gave the rabbit a smack on the head as well.
Professor Bloom says the results are contrary to the prevailing theory that human beings start their lives with a ‘moral blank state’. He suggests it flies in the face of psychologists such as Sigmund Freud who believed humans began life as ‘amoral animals’ and William James who described a baby’s mental life as ‘one great, blooming, buzzing confusion’.
Peter Willatts, a senior lecturer in psychology at Dundee University, said:
‘You cannot get inside the mind of the baby. You cannot ask them. You have to go on what most attracts their attention.
‘We now know that in the first six months babies learn things much quicker than we thought possible. What they are born with and what they learn is difficult to divide.’