Moral babies: are humans naturally good or bad?

Are humans naturally good or bad? A BBC article (14 January, 2013) reports that experiments with babies may reveal the answer.

Psychologists think babies’ minds might showcase human nature because they are yet to be influenced culturally – they don’t have many friends, they’ve never been to school, and they haven’t read any newspapers or books.

Yale University psychology researchers conducted experiments to determine whether babies have a sense of right and wrong, and whether they have an instinct to prefer good or evil.  Experiments were conducted using puppets. The stage was a scene featuring a bright green hill, and the puppets were cut-out shapes with wobbly eyes glued onto them. These shapes consisted of a triangle, a square, and a circle – each in different colours. The puppets performed a short play in which one of the shapes tried to climb the hill, struggling up and falling down. The two other shapes played roles of helper or hinderer. The helping shape assisted the first shape to climb the hill by pushing up from behind, whereas the hindering shape tried to prevent the first shape from climbing the hill by pushing back from above. The puppets are just shapes with eyes – they don’t have a human form, they don’t make a sound, and they don’t display emotions (such as smiling or frowning). They just move.

After the puppet show, the babies are given the choice of reaching for a shape. The result was that babies were much more likely to reach for the helper. The researchers believe that the movements of the shapes were interpreted, by the babies, as the helper is nice and the hinderer is nasty.

Researchers conducted a second puppet show for the same babies. This time the climber shape made a choice to move towards either the helper shape or the hinderer shape. The result was that the babies spent significantly more time looking at the climber when it moved toward the hinderer. This makes sense, thought the researchers, because if the climber moved toward the helper then there would be a happy ending, but if the climber moved toward the hinderer, then what would happen? The babies would look longer to seemingly find out what happened.

Therefore the researchers believe that babies already had expectations about how the shapes should act. Not only do they interpret the movements of the shapes as resulting from motivations, but they prefer the “helping” motivations rather than the “hindering” motivations. And therefore babies know right from wrong, and good from bad. And that adult morality has the basis in good intentions.

Not everyone believes that these experiments show definitely whether humans are naturally good or bad. Some say the experiments just show that babies are self-interested and expect others to be the same way. Others say that, at the very minimum, the experiments reveal a basic instinct for babies to prefer friendly intentions rather than malicious ones.

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130114-are-we-naturally-good-or-bad