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Since Aristotle, humans have been labeled as “social animals.” From birth, humans learn to interact with other humans, navigating the complexities of what Professor Karen Wynn of Yale University calls a “social terrain.” As adults, living in a social terrain means passing judgments on other individuals, but can babies make these same judgments? And if they do, are they moral, social, or both?
In a lecture sponsored by Dartmouth’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences on February 7, Wynn addressed these questions, citing numerous studies done on infants in the Yale Infant Cognition Center. According to Wynn, babies show abilities to make rudimentary moral and social judgments.
In one of her earlier studies, Wynn and her team presented babies ranging from three months to 10 months old with two scenarios: In one, a “nice,” prosocial character helped someone trying to achieve a goal, like getting up a hill or opening a box. In the other, a “mean,” antisocial character hindered someone trying to achieve that goal. When presented with the “prosocial” and “antisocial” figures, babies of all ages preferred the “prosocial” character, either reaching for or making eye contact with the favored character. The importance of the social context reflected in the disappearance of any preference when the original character was replaced by an inanimate object.
Another of Wynn’s studies suggests that this preference can last for months at a time and is strong enough that babies are willing to suffer a loss to associate with a “good” instead of a “bad” character, taking fewer crackers from the nice character over more crackers from the mean one.
More interestingly, babies were more willing to reward a “good” character and punish a “bad” character when asked to give or take a treat away from either character. Despite having no prior or personal relationship to any of the characters, babies will judge these strangers’ actions, suggesting some ability for moral judgment. In a wider scope, the findings warn that negative social behaviors can incur similar negative consequences in one’s relationships with other social creatures.
However, Wynn characterized the babies’ judgments as only partially moral because some of the basis focuses on preference for similar opinions rather than anything fundamentally moral. Babies may be moral, but they may also be discriminatory.
Like human adults and animals across various species, babies possess a “preference boost,” favoring those who share something in common with them. When researchers let babies pick one of two toys, and then presented them with two puppets, one of which chose the same toy the baby picked and one which picked the other toy, babies preferred the toy that shared their “opinions.” These results were replicated in other conditions, including choice of mitten color and food. Like before, babies demonstrated their passing of social judgment on these characters, preferring puppets that helped nice characters and puppets that hindered mean characters.
Although the studies are not finalized, Wynn believes that the paramount factor in creating this bias is in choice. Shared similarities based on what is given rather than chosen remove the babies’ preferences for the character that share the object.
These findings, Wynn hopes, can be cross-applied to the wider, adult world.
By probing how humans are biased towards others who are similar to them, Wynn believes that people can better address the conflicts arising from the wide variety of opposing values and agendas in our search for tolerance. Perhaps by understanding the basic mechanism of social evaluation in babies and other groups, scientists can more effectively provide insight into the importance of social issues like diversity.
“We have to find a way to get all get along,” Wynn said. “I have a little bit of hope that studying babies can be one tiny piece of the answer to this very big and thorny question.”