The leading story in the video, “Born good? Babies help unlock the origins of morality,” is framed in order to secure and sustain funding and attention in the continued pursuit of understanding infant morality. It’s easier to sensationalize the claim that there’s, “a universal moral core that all humans share,” (Stahl 06:20 – 06:25) rather than say that, “the experiments show they (babies) are little bigots” (Stahl 09:47 – 09:52), as was said in the report. The subsequent studies that Yale’s Baby Lab’s put out have since focused on inherent infant bias rather than inherent morality as was first discussed in 2007 (Referenced below but not discussed). This newscast leads with the suggestion that infants are predisposed to inherent altruism, but follows up with the claim that this is usually for a specific group of “like” people, without cultural intervention. It’s my belief that these puppet-show experiments have a lot to say about adult humans and our morality.
The rationale in calling the report “sensational” is evidenced during the discussion of 3 month old babies when the anchor says, “Since research has shown that babies look longer at things they like,” (Stahl 03:30 – 03:35). This is different from the claim in the first study and shows the news article to be a sensational news piece and not merely the scientific discussion on infant morality. The study, “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants,” referenced in the newscast states that it was, “capitalizing on the phenomenon that infants tend to look longer at unexpected or surprising events,” in its opening paragraph (Hamlin para. 2). The difference in what was said in the news differs in meaning from what was said in the scientific article and invites some skepticism.
Skewing scientific data to satisfy a confirmation bias in order to serve a capitalistic attention-capturing behavior for news ratings is evidenced by this single news report. It’s my belief that the producer of the news article, Shari Finkelstein, alongside scientific fact, sensationalized data in order to overstate a narrative that’s not described wholly by the findings presented in the published studies. This means that in addition to the infant inherent bias discussed, that the research was done at all and a news story exists about it indicates that there’s some point in adult life where folks seek out patterns in morals and what moral behavior itself is, beyond simply exhibiting it so that they start to see it everywhere, even where it may not be. This leads to an inherent confirmation bias that must be confronted in research.
One issue with the first study is that it wasn’t very well controlled because the emotional states of all babies show them in a good mood. It can be presumed that all ~44 mothers in the actual study lived an American life and thus were exposed to American culture during the time in which they were pregnant. With the children well taken care of, is it possible that the babies’ emotional states lead to them selecting the “nice” stuffed animal? Is it possible that the babies were exposing how they felt at the time and not merely what they felt was right? Could it be the case that if they were in distress they would’ve instead picked the “mean” animal?
Could the child instead know intuitively, or have learned in <5 months, that its selection for the more desirable animal would yield better results from their caretakers and instead just have been performing an opportunistic action not inherently based on any ethos but instead based on them realizing that their parents would tend to reward them more often were they to select the “better” animal as a way to appease their caretakers, such as one might consider from a pre-heteronomous stage of development, borrowing from Jean Piaget’s classification system? Could it be the case that as time goes on they simply forget that they’re opportunistic in nature, effectively “crippling” their evolutionarily-selected tendencies, and then they’re left with an ethos that revolves around altruistic traits that’re against their own inherent nature, but rewarded by the culture they live in? A more robust study would consider these differences across spans of a few generations, and also across up to dozens of different cultures.
In support of this line of questioning, the other studies discussed in the video show that it’s more the case that children’s behavior changes in response to learned cultural surroundings, and thus implies that much of the moral or ethical behavior in adults is the result of this learned behavior in childhood and possibly all the way back to prenatal existence and before. Furthermore, subsequent follow-up studies have lead the research down a line of exploring inherent bias in babies that Wynn continues to pursue.
Works Cited
Chalik, Lisa, and Karen Wynn. “Ingroup Positivity and Outgroup Negativity Jointly Motivate Toddlers’ Social Behavior.” Taylor & Francis Online, The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 184(3), 163– 177, 17 Jan. 2023, doi.org/10.1080/00221325.2023.2167591. Accessed 16Sep2024.
Hamlin, J. Kiley, et al. “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants.” Yale University Mind and Development Lab, Nature Magazine, 22 Nov. 2007, minddevlab.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Social%20evaluation%20by%20preverbal %20infants.pdf. Accessed 16Sep2024.
Jordan, A. E., & Wynn, K. “Adults’ pedagogical messages engender children’s preference
for self-resembling others.” Developmental Science, 25, e13206. 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13206. Accessed 16Sep2024.
Stahl, Lesley. “Born Good? Babies Help Unlock the Origins of Morality.” YouTube, CBS News, 18 Nov. 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRvVFW85IcU. Accessed 16Sep2024.