Are We Inherently Good or Evil? What Babies Teach us About Morality
Are we inherently good or evil? This question, and questions like it, have been asked for millennia and almost always to no avail. Philosophers argued over what it means for someone to be good (they still do) and theologians wondered if evil was the product of free will or determinism. All along, empirical evidence was nowhere to be seen.
The last few decades in psychology changed that. Now, psychologists have some idea (though there are still many unknowns to be sure) of whether or not we are inherently good or bad. The first finding is it is misleading to ask this question in the first place. The more accurate picture is that we possess both good and bad tendencies that are present at birth, and the interaction between genes and environment influences how they will be drawn out. Gary Marcus describes this interaction best, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable… Built-in does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.” A helpful analogy is a control board where the genes are like volume knobs and switches with the environment acting on them.
This brings me to a brand new paper out of the University of British Columbia by Kiley Hamlin and a team of researchers from Yale University and Temple University. Here’s what they did:
Researchers presented four scenarios to 100 babies using animal hand puppets. After watching puppets act negatively or positively towards other characters, the babies were shown puppets either giving or taking toys from these “good” or “bad” puppets. When prompted to choose their favorite characters, babies preferred puppets that mistreated the bad characters from the original scene, compared to those that treated them nicely. (You can watch the videos here)
Hamlin’s study suggests that babies as young as eight months old, “prefer it when people who commit or condone antisocial acts are mistreated.” The study also provides “insights into the protective mechanisms humans use to choose social alliances, which she [Hamlin] says are rooted in self-preservation” and it demonstrates “early forms of the complex behaviors and emotions that get expressed later in life.”
Hamlin’s work complements a similar study published this October by Marco Schmidt and Jessica Summerville. In their study Schmidt and Summervile presented 15 month year old babies two videos: one in which an experimenter distributes an equal share of crackers to two recipients and another in which the experimenter distributes an unequal share of crackers (they also did the same procedure with milk). They measured how the babies looked at the crackers and milk while they were distributed. They found that babies spent more time looking when one recipient got more food than the other. This means, according to “violation of expectancy,” which describes how babies pay more attention to something when it surprises them, that “the infants [expecting] an equal and fair distribution of food… were surprised to see one person given more crackers or milk than the other.”
It also complements a study Hamlin completed with Paul Bloom and Karen Wynn while she was still at Yale. Bloom summarizes in the New York Times:
In one of our first studies of moral evaluation, we decided… to use… a three-dimensional display in which real geometrical objects, manipulated like puppets, acted out the helping/hindering situations: a yellow square would help the circle up the hill; a red triangle would push it down. After showing the babies the scene, the experimenter placed the helper and the hinderer on a tray and brought them to the child. In this instance, we opted to record… which character they reached for, on the theory that what a baby reaches for is a reliable indicator of what a baby wants. In the end, we found that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual.
Similar to Hamlin’s latest study, this research suggests that babies (3-months) prefer characters that help others over characters that do not.
What does this say about us being good or evil? It suggests that babies are born with certain moral capacities and the potential to have a strong moral sense. This does not confirm nor deny that we are inherently… well, anything. As I mentioned earlier, the interaction between genes and environment influences our behaviors and personalities; we are not blank slates, in other words. Importantly, what Hamlin’s work is showing is that we are also not moral blank slates.
Hamlin, J., Wynn, K., Bloom, P., & Mahajan, N. (2011). How infants and toddlers react to antisocial others Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1110306108