photo: Michael Glasgow/Creative Commons via flickr
DCL
Personally I find this very interesting as it gives some scientific weight to the idea that, if only at the most basic and broad level, there is an underlying human universality of right and wrong, or at the very least a sense of fairness: The Telegraph reports on experiments being done at Yale University's Infant Cognition Center which indicate that infants already can sense good behavior from bad.
Professor Paul Bloom, the psychologist who lead the study, says:
A growing body of evidence...suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgement and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.
Those well-designed experiments? Since you can't ask children of this age what they are thinking, you have to observe what attracts their attention.
For example, in one experiment babies aged six to twelve months watched an animated film in which different shapes with eyes (a red ball, a yellow square, and a green triangle) interact. The red ball is trying to climb a hill, while the square tries to help and the triangle tries to prevent it. Measuring how long the babies focused on each character revealed that in 80% of the cases, the babies chose the helpful character.
Other experiments used similar parameters with similar results.
Read more: The Telegraph
