Babies are biologically hardwired to discriminate between good and bad behaviour and favour right behaviour, writes WILIAM REVILLE
PAUL BLOOM, a developmental psychologist at Yale University wrote a fascinating article in the New Times Magazineon May 5th 2010 entitled The Moral Life of Babies.Bloom's article summarises recent research, much of it his own, indicating that babies are born biologically hardwired with a fundamental capacity to discriminate between morally right and wrong behaviour and that they favour right behaviour. The mature moral convictions of adults are significantly moulded by culture but also depend on this biological underpinning.
Until relatively recently it was thought that babies’ minds are blank slates on which all knowledge of the world is gradually written by parents, educators and the general cultural environment. But, as Bloom explains: “One of the great discoveries in modern psychology is that this view of babies is mistaken”. Recent research shows that babies are endowed with a sense of “naive physics” and “naive psychology”. They think of objects largely as adults do and expect objects to obey the laws of physics, eg babies are surprised if you remove the support beneath a block and it remains suspended in mid-air. Babies also have some grasp of how people think and act, eg if they see a person putting an object in a box and the object is later removed and placed in another box when that person isn’t looking, 15-month-olds expect the person to later reach into the box in which the object was originally placed.
But, what about innate moral sense? Morality is different to physics and psychology. It means differentiating between what is right and wrong, what is fair and unfair, what is kind and cruel, what is loyal and fickle, what is innocent and guilty, etc. Morality also requires that “good” behaviour deserves reward and “bad” behaviour merits punishment. And there is an assumption that moral behaviour is freely chosen.
Most of the research described by Bloom was carried out on babies between the ages of six months and 18 months. Babies’ responses and choices were largely determined on the basis of their eye movements. It is well established that babies tend to look longer at something they find interesting or unexpected.
An early experiment involved nine- to 12-month-old children watching animated films of geometrical characters with faces. For example, a red ball tries to go up a hill and yellow square helps it by nudging it upwards, but, sometimes a green triangle gets in front of it and pushes it back. Following these films, the babies were shown films in which the ball approaches either the square or the triangle. The children looked longer when the ball approached the hindering triangle than when it approached the helpful square – the babies found the approach to the triangle to be surprising.
Later experiments showed that six- to 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful character to the hindering one, rewarding the “good guy” and punishing the “bad guy”. In one experiment a puppet rolled a ball to two other puppets, one of whom rolled the ball back but the other puppet grabbed the ball and ran way with it. Both the co-operative and the non-cooperative play companions were then placed before one-year- old toddlers and a pile of sweets was placed beside each puppet. The toddlers were asked to take a sweet away from one puppet. Most babies took the sweet away from the “naughty” puppet. Some babies also spontaneously added a smack to the naughty one’s head.
It has long been known that babies and toddlers are equipped with the capacity for empathy and altruism – a baby registers distress when he/she hears another baby crying; toddlers spontaneously assist an adult who is struggling, eg trying to open a door when carrying a large heavy object. And the work described by Bloom seems to show that babies are hard-wired with a foundational sense of morality: “some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone”. The baby presumably feels these moral instincts at a gut-level, but, as Bloom points out, without this emotional empathic underlay, it would surely be impossible to later develop any rational code of morality. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711– 1776) argued that rationality alone cannot be the basis of morality.
The observation that we all seem to be born with basic moral instincts harmonises with the well-known fact that people everywhere share fundamental ethical values – nowhere is cowardice praised and bravery condemned, dishonesty praised and fairness condemned, meanness praised and kindness condemned, etc. It also harmonises with the concept of natural law which holds that all of us instinctively know what is basically right and basically wrong – it is written in our hearts.
William Reville is UCC’s associate professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer - understandingscience.ucc.ie