Read more: Special report: Morality put to the test
The behaviour of babies shows that we’ve got kindness built in, says Paul Bloom, but extending it to strangers takes some work
MANY scientists who study morality are interested in why people behave badly, but I am more curious to understand why we are so nice. We give extraordinary amounts to charity, donate our blood, give directions to lost tourists and perform acts of random kindness every day. It is no surprise that modern humans can often be selfish and cruel, but this kindness poses a deep puzzle.
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As a developmental psychologist, I am interested in the origins of this kindness. It seems that much of it is part of human nature, not the product of culture or parenting. The economist Adam Smith pointed out long ago that when you see somebody in pain, you feel it – to an extent – as if it were your own, and you are motivated to make it go away. Modern research shows this is true even of babies. When babies hear crying, they cry, and if they see someone suffer, even silently, they become distressed. As soon as they can move, babies will try to help. They’ll stroke the person, or hand over a toy or bottle.
In my own research, I have been studying the development of our capacity to judge the behaviour of others as right or wrong. Along with Karen Wynn, who runs the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, and our graduate student Kiley Hamlin, now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, I created a set of short plays for babies using puppets. In one, a character would struggle to get up a hill. One puppet would help him; another would push him down. We then presented each baby with the two puppets. Even those as young as 6 months old tended to reach for the “good guy”, suggesting that this is who they prefer. We also created plays in which one puppet does neither good nor bad, and we found that babies reach for a good guy over a neutral guy, but would rather reach for a neutral than a bad guy. This suggests babies are both drawn towards the good guy and away from the bad (Nature, vol 450, p 557).
“Babies are drawn to the good guy and away from the bad. They have the foundations of morality”
More recently, we explored the judgements of 3-month-olds. Although babies that young cannot coordinate their actions well enough to reach for something, we knew from the previous study that babies first tend to look to where they’re going to reach. As predicted, they looked at the good guy, and not at the bad guy, suggesting that they, too, favour this character (Developmental Science, ).
Are these true moral judgements? It’s an open question. One might ask, for instance, whether babies are motivated to reward the good character and punish the bad – this is the focus of ongoing work. At minimum, though, we can conclude that babies are sensitive to third-party interactions of a positive and negative nature, and that this influences how they behave. They have, then, the foundations of morality.
Can these inborn proclivities explain the scope of human kindness? Probably not. Other studies suggest that the kindness of babies is very parochial. Babies prefer the familiar: they prefer to hear their native language rather than a foreign one; babies raised in white households prefer to look at white faces while those raised in black households prefer black faces. Such preferences grow into biases and behaviours. At around 9 months, they’ll show stranger anxiety and, later on, sort themselves into groups, dividing the world into us versus them, showing little sign of caring about distant others.
None of this is surprising. Our brains have evolved through natural selection to favour those who share our genes and those with whom we continually interact. It is entirely predictable that our natural reaction to strangers is at best indifference and more typically fear and disgust.
A theory of human kindness needs two parts. The core of our moral sense is explained by our evolved nature, but its extension to strangers is the product of our culture, our intelligence and our imagination.
