{"id":18656,"date":"2010-05-10T13:45:38","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T19:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=18656"},"modified":"2010-05-10T13:45:38","modified_gmt":"2010-05-10T19:45:38","slug":"babies-know-the-difference-between-good-and-evil-at-six-months-study-reveals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/?p=18656","title":{"rendered":""Babies know the difference between good and evil at six months, study reveals""},"content":{"rendered":"

Well now. This<\/a> is rather interesting:<\/p>\n

At the age of six months babies can barely sit up — let along take their first tottering steps, crawl or talk.<\/p>\n

But, according to psychologists, they have already developed a sense of moral code — and can tell the difference between good and evil.<\/p>\n

An astonishing series of experiments is challenging the views of many psychologists and social scientists that human beings are born as ‘blank slates’ — and that our morality is shaped by our parents and experiences.<\/p>\n

Instead, they suggest that the difference between good and bad may be hardwired into the brain at birth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A physical rejection of the idea that “morality” is but a social construct (rather than, say, an essentialist survival instinct) wired directly into the body’s physio-chemical structure? The hell you say!<\/p>\n

Although I guess that would explain why I never found the shape of a laundry basket<\/a> particularly oppressive.<\/p>\n

But be that as it may:<\/p>\n

Professor Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University in Connecticut, whose department has studied morality in babies for years, said: ‘A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.<\/p>\n

‘With the help of well designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life.<\/p>\n

‘Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bones.’<\/p>\n

For one study, the Yale researchers got babies aged between six months and a year to watch a puppet show in which a simple, colourful wooden shape with eyes tries to climb a hill.<\/p>\n

Sometimes the shape is helped up the hill by a second toy, while other times a third character pushes it down.<\/p>\n

After watching the show several times, the babies were shown the helpful and unhelpful toys. They showed a clear preference for the helpful toys – spending far longer looking at the ‘good’ shapes than the ‘bad’ ones.<\/p>\n

‘In the end, we found that six- and ten-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual,’ Prof Bloom told the New York Times.<\/p>\n

‘This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for the good guy.’<\/p>\n

Two more tests found the same moral sense.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, if this is true (and some psychologists will suggest alternative explanations for the tests’ results), I can think of a number of social constructs that would demand a subsequent revisiting. Like, for instance, tenuring leftist postmodernists who continue to teach their peculiar brand of epistemological relativism<\/i> as a function of turning every proposition into a trite variable in some power relation.<\/p>\n

BECAUSE OF THE ANTI-SCIENCE-ISM!<\/p>\n

(h\/t JHO)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well now. This is rather interesting: At the age of six months babies can barely sit up — let along take their first tottering steps, crawl or talk. But, according to psychologists, they have already developed a sense of moral code — and can tell the difference between good and evil. An astonishing series of experiments is challenging the views of many psychologists and social scientists that human beings are<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":9196393,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9196393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18656\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/proteinwisdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}