Baby Morality

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?pagewanted=1&sq=baby&st=cse&scp=13

In a recent experiment on baby morality, researchers put on a puppet show for a 1-year-old boy in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide a ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. Then, the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left, who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were set before the toddler, each next to a pile of treats. The toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the "naughty" one. But this punishment wasn't enough - he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

Psychologists have long argued that we begin life as amoral animals. An important task of society, particularly parents, is to turn babies into civilized beings who can experience empathy, guilt and shame, override selfish impulses in the name of higher principles, and respond with outrage to unfairness and injustice.

However, a growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of experiments, we can see bits of moral thought, judgement and feeling, even in the first year of life. Still, socialization is very important because the sense of right and wrong that babies and young children naturally possess diverges in important ways from what adults generally want it to be.