Michael Shermer takes a look at the work of Just Babies author Paul Bloom, who studies how infants and toddlers approach morality:
In Bloom’s laboratory, a one-year-old baby watched puppets enact a morality play. One puppet rolled a ball to a second puppet, who passed the ball back. The first puppet then rolled the ball to a different puppet, who ran off with the ball. The baby was next given a choice between taking a treat away from the “nice” puppet or the “naughty” one. As Bloom predicted, the infant removed the treat from the naughty puppet—which is what most babies do in this experiment. But for this little moralist, removing a positive reinforcement (the treat) was not enough. “The boy then leaned over and smacked this puppet on the head,” Bloom recounts. In his inchoate moral mind, punishment was called for.
There are numerous permutations on this research paradigm—such as a puppet trying to roll a ball up a ramp, for which another puppet either helps or hinders it. Time and again, the moral sense of right (preferring helping puppets) and wrong (abjuring hurting puppets) emerges in people between three and 10 months of age, far too early to attribute to learning and culture. Morality, Bloom concludes, “entails certain feelings and motivations, such as a desire to help others in need, compassion for those in pain, anger toward the cruel, and guilt and pride about our own shameful and kind actions….” Society’s laws and customs can turn the moral dials up or down, of course, but nature endowed us with the dials in the first place. This is why the constitutions of our nations should be grounded in the constitution of our nature.
The Dish 