Comments on: Infants prefer a nasty moose if it punishes an unhelpful elephant

By: Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 21:06:38 +0000

Dawn – good question! Not a problem here, because they swapped round which puppet was good and which was bad between different trials.

By: Dawn

Dawn — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 11:40:36 +0000

Interesting! I wonder if the color the elephants and moose were wearing had any affect. The bad moose wore red and the good moose wore green. The bad elephant wore red and the good elephant wore yellow. Also the good one was always on the left and the bad one on the right. Just wondering if they could have been variables.

By: Donna

Donna — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:48:53 +0000

@Troy, while I agree that moral behavior enables our survival as a species, I hardly think that selfish short-term behavior has been eliminated from our repertoire. And there is much in our culture to support that idea that people are primarily motivated by self-serving reasons; our economic system is structured around that idea.

I think this research is exciting in part because in showing that infants have innate tendencies to make complex moral choices, it inveighs against the notion that children are blank slates who must be taught morality in order to act decently. We need to primarily support and encourage children to become more aware of, exercise, and thereby develop the capacities they already have. Better they should learn that their own judgment is generally reliable than to think that they must keep consulting external codes of conduct to know how to behave morally. They’ll thereby become more autonomous individuals.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 07:00:23 +0000

@Ed-I’m a little confused about why it couldn’t be an issue of increasing memory ability. Couldn’t it be the case that the 5-month-olds weren’t able to hold onto the memory of the elephant’s actions in the first video? The similar levels of preference for the giver moose just reflects giving=good. Whereas the 8-month-olds might be better able to remember “this elephant is bad/good” while watching the moose scenario?

Could you examine this by showing both scenarios, but instead of presenting the moose, you ask kids which elephant they preferred? If there’s no memory of the elephant’s initial action, there should be no helpful/unhelpful preference. If they do remember that an elephant acted in a particular way, there should be a preference for the helpful one.

By: Anne

Anne — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 03:07:38 +0000

The real lesson here is that adults need to be aware that babies know innately about right and wrong, and that adults behave in front of them in ways that challenge this judgement. It can be subtle adult behaviours, not the really crazy parental fighting or physical abuse towards children like surprising wacks on the head accompanied by laughter or teasing and taunting. When right and wrong are mixed up, with no acknowledgement on the part of the adults, a child’s brain will have to rationalize this leading to all sorts of behavioural problems. A daunting task to show a child the world of adults and try to keep their wired virtues intact! Makes me think of the story ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’!

I agree with Aurelia (14) – can antisocial, autism, and even psychopathic behaviour be detected early?

By: Grizwald Grim

Grizwald Grim — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 20:02:07 +0000

If you watch the “choice” videos (they show up after you play the embedded ones), you might question the results based on what you see. I did.

Seems like the way the choice is presented may be making a much bigger impression on which moose is chosen than the puppet show.

By: bob

bob — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:55:18 +0000

“To me this says that toddlers already have more or less adult moral understanding. Isn’t this amazing? I don’t know in what way adults would react in the same situation in a more sophisticated way”

Wow — this is a crazy overreach. My daughter is 4, about 10 times more sophisticated in her thinking than an 8 month old, and her moral reasoning is incredibly simple and , well, childish.

I suspect very strongly,that the further experiments will reveal this apparently sophisticated moral reasoning will be explained with a much simpler mechanism. Just a hunch — time will tell.

By: Aurelia

Aurelia — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:56:33 +0000

I wonder if these experiments will reveal early indications of neuro-atypical development, in particular autism. Could these children be followed over time, so that their responses to these kinds of social situations can be compared to their own later development, which might tease out some usefulness of these kinds of tests for that purpose, as well as to establish a general norm?

By: Troy

Troy — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:38:41 +0000

I’m not sure I follow why this is profound. Morality can pretty easily be explained by natural selection. If our natural inclination were to kill, rob or rape each other society would have hardly progressed. Civilization wouldn’t be possible. Our natural instinct to help one another and to be hostile to those who don’t can easily be explained by our collective need for self preservation. While taking whatever you want by any means necessary may be more immediately useful to the person who engages in that kind of behavior it’s not ultimately beneficial to our collective health as a species. Who wants to live in that kind of world? We have, naturally and over time, eliminated that kind of thinking and behavior. It’s not useful to our survival as a species.

Why is this concept so hard to grasp?

By: jean

jean — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 18:05:48 +0000

Very interesting.So what does that say about the exceptions I wonder.That leaves on quarter of the babies who didnt have this reaction.Does that mean there is a possibility a full 25% are anti-social?
That would explain alot.