Even four-month-old infants expect adults to comfort crying babies. The finding suggests that we may be born with a foundation of morality that becomes the basis for more advanced moral and social behaviour in later life.
Psychologists have long debated whether moral behaviour is innate or learned. In 2007, Kiley Hamlin and colleagues at Yale University found that 6-month-old and 10-month-old babies prefer people who help others, and to those who don’t.
But to understand how we develop our moral beliefs, we need to know not just whether babies prefer those who help others, but also whether they expect such behaviour.
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To find out, Â of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her colleagues played videos to babies aged 4 months and 12 months. The videos showed an unfamiliar woman folding laundry, with a stroller at the back of the room. In some of the videos, the stroller began to shake, and there was the sound of a baby crying, suggesting that the stroller contained an infant in distress. In one video, the woman went to rock the stroller and stop the baby crying. In another, she just continued to fold laundry, ignoring the baby.
It’s well known that when infants are surprised by something that does not follow their expectations, they spend longer looking at it. The team found that the infants looked significantly longer at the video in which the adult ignored the baby, suggesting they expected her to comfort it.
Appropriate behaviour
But these weren’t the only videos the babies saw. They were also shown scenes in which laughing sounds, not crying, seemed to be coming from the stroller. When watching these videos, the babies didn’t look longer when the woman ignored the stroller, unlike in the crying videos.
In another series of tests, 8-month-old infants were given the choice of touching a screen to play either the “comfort crying scene” or the “ignore crying scene”. The 18 infants who participated in the experiment chose to view the ignore scene more than twice as often as the comfort scene, suggesting that they found this very surprising.
The results tell us that the first draft of human moral cognition includes expectations about other’s welfare, says Baillargeon. She thinks that the babies would have responded the same way if it had been a man in the video, not a woman. “I believe infants would expect any human adult who is alone with a crying baby to try to comfort the baby – but we have not tested that yet.”
, who is now at the University of British Columbia in Canada, is impressed by the results. If babies don’t come into the world with their expectations, then perhaps they come into the world prepared to figure them out very quickly, she says.
Cognitive Psychology
