Moral Compass Detected In Babies As Young As 1-Year-Old

[zg7666]

A recent study presents strong evidence to suggest that children as young as 12 to 24 months can understand morality, and more importantly, that this basic perception of “right and wrong” is strongly tied to their parents’ personal ideologies...

 

 

http://www.medicaldaily.com/moral-compass-detected-babies-young-1-year-old-suggesting-children-arent-innocent-we-350990

[AccuTron]

The article and its links are light on details.  

 

There is the claim of ALL the infants liked prosocial behavior, and differences may show up at one or two years.  What differences?  A sharing game is mentioned, and no details.  Were some of the toddlers simply confused by the game, and not even at the place of moral judgement?  Maybe they have a strong inner sense of "Opt out" and would be the future leaders least likely to join the EU.

 

In the experiment of children reaching more for the toy representing prosocial than anti-social characters previously seen in a video, were some of the children simply curious about this bad toy, trying to understand it, or defeat it's threat by handling it and it didn't bite them, and they control the threat, which is actually a strength?  We don't know the motives. 

 

We are told of "larger brainwaves" watching the prosocial characters.  What waves, what the heck does that even mean?  The toddlers differences seem to be larger neural response to prosocial characters, correlating with parental behaviors.  But how accurate are those questionnaires, how does skewed self-reporting affect them?  How robust are these numbers to begin with?

 

I read elsewhere in the links how the very young are drawn to others who are similar racially, and it's really a matter of familiarity in reading faces, not racial per se.  Are these children reaching for the good guy toys because the toys are superficially more like their parents, easier to interpret?  That sounds good on the surface, but it's surface.  We don't know about the toddlers future behaviors.  The claim of different observed behaviors seems largely limited to which toy they reached for.  This says little to nothing about what they are actually thinking.

[Koroviev]

Paul Bloom wrote about this in his 2013 book Just Babies 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CVS0W7K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

[dsayers]

Paul Bloom wrote about this in his 2013 book Just Babies 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CVS0W7K/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

As did Alison Gopnik in her her 1998 book The Philosophical Baby.

 

It's crazy how long some of this information has been around. I remember one time, Stef made a video where he read an article from 1975(!) that spoke of an aspect of human nature that we're not talked about despite it's misuse being prevalent in our society.