Babies and a sense of morality?
Research conducted with babies in Canada suggests that infants as young as four months old are able to make quite sophisticated moral and perhaps even legal judgements regarding what is right and wrong, and even the allocation of punishment. Dr Norman Swan discussed this with research psychologist Kylie Hamlin from the University of British Columbia.
Kylie Hamlin: I'm interested in our moral sense as adults, how we know what things are good and bad and what things are right and wrong, and which individuals are the good guys and which are the bad guys. And I'm interested in how this comes to happen in adults. We know that most adults very clearly know that hitting is wrong and giving to charity is good, but we don't necessarily know how they came about that knowledge. And what I've been doing is asking that question in babies before they can speak, before they went to school, before their parents have really taught them much about what's good and bad, and asked whether, even though they haven't really been taught this stuff, whether they already know.
Norman Swan: How do you do that?
Kylie Hamlin: Well, basically we show them these little puppet shows in which there are good puppets and bad puppets.
Norman Swan: Live puppet shows?
Kylie Hamlin: Yes, we have a bunch of puppeteers who are putting these shows on for babies and there's a puppet who has some goal that it can't achieve—so, say, to get to the top of a hill or to open a box or to get his ball back that he dropped.
Norman Swan: So, a very simple story.
Kylie Hamlin: Right, totally simple. And the babies see two additional puppets, one of whom is always helpful to the character, so maybe pushes him up the hill or gives him his ball back or opens the box for him…
Norman Swan: Are they being verbal?
Kylie Hamlin: No, they're just doing this with their actions, so there are no sounds at all except maybe when the box gets shut, you can hear that happening. So the mean puppets are hitting the guy down the hill or slamming the box closed or taking the ball away. And so we show them these a number of times until they get what we call habituated to the event, until they get bored with it.
Norman Swan: Just to make sure they've taken it in.
Kylie Hamlin: Exactly. With little babies you often will make sure they've gotten everything they are going to get out of it by showing them the same thing over and over again, because once they don't want to look any more it suggests they just don't need any more information. And then we simply have them choose between the helpful puppets and the unhelpful puppets. And we find a huge number of babies, almost every single baby we ever tested, have liked the nice puppets over the mean puppets.
Norman Swan: How do you know they like it?
Kylie Hamlin: Basically the most basic way to ask is just which one do they want to touch. If they are given the two puppets equally far from their hands, we just see which one they touch first.
Norman Swan: And what about babies who aren't even sitting up yet and don't reach very much at all?
Kylie Hamlin: Right, before about four-and-a-half months of age babies don't yet reach out for objects in the world; sometimes they flap their arms towards objects in the world, sometimes they will try to eat it or stuff like that, but they are not good reachers yet. And those babies, we hold the puppets just up in front of their faces for 30 seconds and just measure the amount of seconds that they look at the nice puppet versus the mean puppet, and we find basically exactly the same pattern of results. So even three-month-olds look longer at nice helpful puppets than they do at mean unhelpful puppets.
Norman Swan: Do you control for things like whether or not the children have seen television or they've been acclimatised to some of this stuff because they've been parked in front of a television set?
Kylie Hamlin: We don't specifically ask things like that. One thing that we haven't found is differences in children that have siblings versus don't have siblings, and you might expect that the experience…
Norman Swan: The evil brother versus the nice sister.
Kylie Hamlin: Right. But basically a baby as young as three months really isn't able to focus on a television screen yet at that point, so we doubt that they're getting much out of it.
Norman Swan: And you've also looked at punishment.
Kylie Hamlin: Yes, so of course as adults we know that good is good, being helpful is good, except there are certain situations in which we think maybe being mean is better, so in the case in which someone deserves punishment.
Norman Swan: You're being mean to somebody because they've been bad.
Kylie Hamlin: Yes, so in some ways it's good to be bad when someone deserves it. So we've shown babies shows in which they are seeing someone be nice and someone be mean to a target, but he himself has been bad before.
Norman Swan: So you're asking the baby do they deserve it.
Kylie Hamlin: That's the idea, yes. So we're trying to ask them, given the choice of someone who was nice to a bad guy or someone who was mean to a bad guy, which one do you prefer? And we thought at first, when we started running this study, that what would happen is that they might be confused—either they might like niceness across the board or they might get confused. And it turns out they are not confused at all; they really like the guys who are mean to the bad guy. And interestingly and importantly they don't like it when you're mean to somebody who somebody else was mean to. So it doesn't seem like they're just matching negative for negative, they actually do…
Norman Swan: They make their own judgement.
Kylie Hamlin: It seems like they are really saying, 'No, no, it's good to be bad to somebody who was bad to someone else, it's not good to be bad to somebody who just happens to have been negative,' or something like that.
Norman Swan: Crime and punishment at four months of age.
Kylie Hamlin: Yes. So those are eight-month-olds, but pretty much yes.
Norman Swan: That's incredible. And how do you assess their approval or disapproval of punishment?
Kylie Hamlin: It's exactly the same way. We always really look at who do they choose first—so this very basic preference. And in the punishment case, first they see a puppet show where one guy's good and one guy's bad, and then they see a second puppet show with a different scenario altogether in which either the good guy from the first show or the bad guy from the first show is now the guy who, say, lost his ball and needs his ball back. And so we ask whether, if it's a bad guy, do they think it's better to give the ball back or take the ball away. And it turns out they think it's better to take the ball away from the bad guy.
Norman Swan: And how many times do they have to see it now? Because you're originally habituating them but you don't do that any more.
Kylie Hamlin: Right, it turns out that they don't need to be habituated to these shows to get this. So in this particular punishment study I've just described there are five characters: so they see a puppet show in the beginning with three characters, a good guy and a bad guy, and then they see one of those characters go into the second puppet show with a good guy and a bad guy, but it turns out that we only have to show them each thing one time for them to even get this complex thing like punishment. So it's pretty incredible how tuned-in to this they are.
Norman Swan: Mindbogglingly—I can't imagine how you've possibly done it—you've studied intent.
Kylie Hamlin: Right, intent is of course something that, if we think about legal systems, is nine-tenths of the issue. So you're still bad if you try to kill someone and don't, and if you…accidentally harming someone is almost never going to get you jail time or whatever. But in the past, studies have shown that kids are really bad at understanding intention in these ways. So kids will say that Jimmy who accidentally broke a whole bunch of teacups deserves punishment, whereas Johnny who only broke one teacup but did it on purpose deserves less punishment, obviously the opposite of what an adult would say. But we thought maybe these puppet-show tasks are easier for kids to understand than are these long verbal stories.
So we just showed them a character who tries to help but fails, tries to help a character get a box open and they fail together, so the box doesn't get open, the guy doesn't get his toy or whatever, versus a guy who tries to harm but fails. So he tries to block the character from getting the box open but he gets it open anyway. And it turns out that when we pit those outcome versus intentions against each other, babies go with intention. So they actually prefer a guy who tries to help but leads to a bad outcome versus a guy who tries to harm. They are going with the mental states of the puppets, in as much as puppets can have mental states, as opposed to the outcome of the bad thing.
Norman Swan: So if it's happening in almost every baby that you test, this has to be hardwired.
Kylie Hamlin: That's the theory, either it's hardwired as in present at birth, or it's hardwired as in there is some kind of learning mechanism, some kind of way in which babies come to the world ready to learn that this is the important stuff. Scientists talk about one-trial learning; things that are really important to us as humans we might learn incredible quickly. So it might be the case that babies are having some experience that is turning this on, but it's turning it on really early and for every baby we test.
Norman Swan: And have you tested babies across the environmental spectrum, from all sorts of backgrounds?
Kylie Hamlin: What you will often find is that you get a pretty narrow range of folks in your study. You know, we get a fairly biased sample, which is parents who are willing and able to take time out of their day to come and help us out with our studies. That said, we do have a spectrum, and the fact that we get so little variation in the babies that we do see suggests that that's not influencing anything. Of course it would be critically important to study these same questions in lots of different cultures in order to make sure that it's still happening. But one of the things about why we study babies is that they have less influence of culture than human adults do, simply because they haven't been in the culture that long.
Norman Swan: So the religious notion that babies are born good is right.
Kylie Hamlin: I like to point out the distinction between being good and thinking that others should be good. As adults of course we often do things that we would judge other people very negatively for doing themselves. What our research shows I think is that babies are inherently judgemental and they think that there is good stuff and bad stuff and good guys and bad guys. Whether they themselves are good is a separate and really interesting research question. I have some work on that, asking whether babies enjoy being helpful, and others have found that very young toddlers—so basically by the time that they are physically capable of doing so, babies will stand up and go help someone get their goal. So it does seem like through this other research that maybe they are sort of born good, but I would say that this particular research is more about judging other people as being good.
Norman Swan: Of course if these things are hardwired you've got to do quite a lot to them in the environment to change that behaviour, and of course many people's behaviour is changed through life.
Kylie Hamlin: That's another point about the relationship between judgement and behaviour. Probably everybody, even those who do bad things, can tell that hitting somebody isn't good. They still do it but they can tell it's bad, and if another person did it they wouldn't like that person. So it might be that there is less variability in how we're able to judge others than there is in what we do ourselves.
Norman Swan: Controlling our behaviour.
Kylie Hamlin: Yes, exactly.
- Kylie Hamlin
- Department of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and Director of the University of British Columbia Centre for Infant Cognition
- Dr Norman Swan
- Nick Ridout