Understanding One Another
Do Infants Possess an Innate Sense of Morality?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
At six and ten months old, infants in J. Kiley Hamlin’s puppet experiments overwhelmingly favored a helpful character over a harmful one. Presenting Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug then reveals the complication: in a later variation involving graham crackers and green beans, infants preferred a mean puppet that shared their taste over a kind puppet that preferred something different.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
How can one tell? “Babies can’t do much on their own. So the researchers put on a puppet show for their pint— sized subjects (six ant ten months old), featuring one puppet that acted helpful, and the another that acted like a jerk. Which puppet would the infants then look for?
The infants favored the helpful puppet. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend. Just about all of the babies reached for the good guy. After centuries of speculating about how babies see the world, here was cautious evidence to suggest we have an innate compass and Homo puppy is not a blank slate. We’re born with a preference for good.; it’s in our nature.
Human nature has another dimension. A few years after this first experiment, Hamlin and her team came up with a variation. This time, they offered infants a choice between Graham Crackers and green beans to establish which they preferred. Then, they presented them with two puppets: one that like crackers, the other beans. Once again they observed which puppet the babies preferred.
Not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority gravitated toward the puppet that shared their own taste. More surprising was that this preference persisted even after the like-minded puppet was revealed to be mean-spirited and the other puppet, nice. ‘What we find over and over again,’ said one of Hamlin’s colleagues ‘is that babies will choose the individual who is actually mean [but similar to them] to the [nice] one who had a different opinion to themselves.