"I don't get it. I just don't get it. And, I don't like it. Where did I go wrong?" says Mikey in the movie Look Who Is Talking. The newborn was expressing his views after finding himself in an unfamiliar world.
You see, when the movie was released in 1989, babies were not expected to understand much of anything. The fact that Mikey verbalised his precocious thoughts (in Bruce Willis' voice) - on his secret to good coffee, dangers of overeating and hoary jokes - was incredible to audiences.
Cut to the present. Babies still don't understand much of our adult world.
Then someone like Dr Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale University, comes along. He could very easily replace both the scriptwriter and Willis, and talk about all that Mikey really knew about, even morality.
Dr Bloom theorises that babies show a glimmer of moral thought, judgement and feeling. Simply stated, babies like Mikey have a rudimentary sense of right and wrong.
Your reaction to Dr Bloom's findings could range from unmasked amusement to fierce disbelief. Your understanding of babies revolves around their ability to gurgle, squeal, coo, babble and sigh, turning the parent into a gushing, delighted emotional bib.
You also recognise their cherubic lineaments of innocence and unadulterated joy. But Dr Bloom's theory, challenges more than a baby's capacity to charm or drool.
He challenges a long-standing view of humans being born as blank slates, and our opinion of how babies aren't as helpless, undisciplined and ignorant as we think they are. Or in the words of great thinkers… French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau called a baby "a perfect idiot" and American philosopher William James said a baby's mental life is "one great blooming, buzzing confusion".
In Dr Bloom's opinion, one of the discoveries in modern psychology is that this view of babies is mistaken. He attempts to convince us that babies eschew wrongful behaviour and that they would scruple to help a "bad guy".
The hard wiring of morality
Dr Bloom, like many scientists and humanists, is fascinated by the capacities and inclinations of babies and children, and is among a handful of research teams exploring the moral life of babies.
He has been involved in baby research for about eight years and has won numerous awards for his research and teaching.
His work on baby morality has been largely collaborative, working with his wife Karen Wynn and graduate student Kiley Hamlin, the lead author of the studies at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University.
After conducting a series of experiments, they surmised that babies probably have no conscious access to moral notions. Neither do they have an idea why certain acts are good or bad, and yet, they respond on a gut level to reward something that they think is good and punish something that they think is bad. In other words, babies make these choices of their own volition.
At this point, you can condense the most obvious question in one terse, pressing word: how? Think about it. How do toddlers, even as young as six months, possess an understanding of right and wrong? Observably you teach children moral lessons using the carrot and stick approach where good acts meet with a positive response and bad acts with a negative. So how do babies - still holding on to rubber teething toys - respond to moral choices?
"Our moral sense is part of our evolution - hard-wired. Babies are wired to have empathy and kindness towards those who are in their immediate proximity. As adults, we want to have better morality. We aspire to be kind to people in faraway lands. We learn sexism, slavery and racism is wrong… these are human discoveries. Babies don't know about these," he says.
To explain baby morality, Dr Bloom uses tacit knowledge or "gut feeling" as a framework.
The phrase tacit knowledge isn't a new concept. It was coined in the 1950s by British-Hungarian chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. One of his famous examples was riding the bicycle; we learn to balance and keep straight lines and stop, but we do it without knowing how. It is the same tacit knowledge that scientists and psychologists employ to make sense of various hypotheses.
Dr Bloom too uses tacit knowledge to expound his theory on morality in babies and to demonstrate how babies viscerally respond to good or bad acts.
He says, "They [babies] simply react. They don't know they're having a particular feeling. They don't contemplate or mull over it. They don't know where that knowledge comes from. Their responses are cognitively empty, but emotionally intense."
To convince you further, he talks about gravity. You expect a ball thrown up in the air to fall down. If it doesn't you will be stunned because it violates a universal law. "It is the same with babies," says Dr Bloom. "They expect the ball to fall down. If it doesn't fall [because it is suspended by an invisible wire], they are equally surprised. They don't know gravitational theory and yet they tend to linger on scenes that violate some law of the universe. Babies are also born with an initial sense of mathematics, but they don't know calculus."
He worked with previous psychological theories, which show how babies tend to look at something that they find interesting or surprising longer than they would at something they find uninteresting or expected.
He used this knowledge as a basis and several other expedients in a laboratory set up.
The experiments: puppets and plays
Dr Bloom and his associates conducted a series of well-designed experiments. Their laboratory work was interdisciplinary, bringing in theory and research from areas such as cognition, evolutionary theory, linguistics, theology, philosophy and social and developmental psychology.
"We looked for volunteers within the community," say Dr Bloom, adding that ethnicity wasn't of consideration.
Their experiments ranged from one-act morality plays to two-dimensional animated movies and three-dimensional displays. (Puppets and objects were used as helpers or hinderers.)
In one of the morality plays, an individual is shown struggling to open a box where the lid is partially open, but would fall back down. Then, on alternating trials, one puppet grabs the lid and opens it all the way, and another puppet jumps on the box and slams it shut.
In another experiment, a puppet plays with a ball, rolling the ball to another puppet that would roll it back. Then the first puppet would roll the ball to a different (third) puppet that would run away with it.
In both experiments, five-month-olds preferred the good puppet, that is the one who helped to open the box or the one who rolled the ball back rather than the bad puppet.
According to Dr Bloom several studies, including the above two, show that babies have a general appreciation of good and bad behaviour. They also inferred that babies respond to behaviours that adults would describe as nice or mean or identify objects and puppets as the helper and hinderer. The team also watched toddlers' reactions where toddlers would smile and clap during good events and frown, shake their heads and look sad during the naughty events.
"The results are striking," he says.
The challenging part of the experiments was designing it in a way so the team could study what they were looking for. Dr Bloom says, "We needed to test under certain circumstances. Karen designed it so we could test a creature who doesn't speak and figure out what he knows."
As far as information goes, Dr Bloom and his team's findings are both edifying and informative. Still, you may want to know if there are any practical benefits.
The benefit of the research
Outside of the lab, Dr Bloom rarely sees examples of his findings. He says, "There are general claims I make about children's altruistic, helping and sharing behaviours that parents can observe if they have young children."
On scientific grounds, his study doesn't have immediate short-term applicability. "Studying the human mind and its origins has huge pay offs in the future. We are building on research conducted on children. There are series of studies that look at their understanding of goals and desires. I am interested in how babies respond and make judgements about morality. There is a gap between what babies know and what adults know. The benefit of the findings is that it tells us something about babies."
People have long debated how much babies know, he says. "It is a controversial scientific field. I think the studies and the experiments are strong. We worked very hard to control problems. We want to find out how much of what we discover about babies constitutes our understanding of morality."
Through the study, Dr Bloom has effectively usurped the notion of parents being teachers of their child's moral code. "However," he says, "this shouldn't deter parents from continuing to concern themselves with [their child's] moral development."
The feedback has been positive. "Many have reacted saying, ‘That makes sense'," he says, admitting that he has described the research to many, "and not one person has asked me why in the world would you study that?"
http://pantheon.yale.edu/~pb85/Paul_Bloom.html
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham believed that the moral rightness or wrongness of an action is a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it produces.
To this, Dr Bloom, replies, "Bentham is making a claim on how we should think about morality. He says when you want to judge something as good or bad, ask yourself the total sum of pleasure or pain it would cause. He is making a position of how we should think about morality. He didn't suggest a psychological theory of how we actually think about morality. In reality, it [how people actually think about morality] is very different [from Bentham's view]."
Moral code of humanity
Some universals make evolutionary sense including fairness, loyalty and kindness.
Morality, though universal, tends to be also understood differently in different cultures. According to Dr Bloom, "Much of morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities. When you talk about children of six months, they don't have culture."
Dr Bloom's latest book, How Pleasure Works, was published in June this year.
Dr Bloom has also worked on How Children Learn the Meanings of Words and Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. Dr Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic.
Carolina D'Souza is Lifestyle Features Coordinator, Friday
