Social Evaluation or Simple Association? Simple Associations May Explain Moral Reasoning in Infants

Abstract

Are we born amoral or do we come into this world with a rudimentary moral compass? Hamlin and colleagues argue that at least one component of our moral system, the ability to evaluate other individuals as good or bad, is present from an early age. In their study, 6- and 10-month-old infants watched two social interactions - in one, infants observed the helper assist the climber achieve the goal of ascending a hill, while in the other, infants observed the hinderer prevent the climber from ascending the hill. When given a choice, the vast majority of infants picked the helper over the hinderer, suggesting that infants evaluated the helper as good and the hinderer as bad. Hamlin and colleagues concluded that the ability to evaluate individuals based on social interaction is innate. Here, we provide evidence that their findings reflect simple associations rather than social evaluations.

Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets

“…Thus, EEG markers, in the SET, support the privilege of negative social information in early development, as demonstrated by habituation paradigms with 3-mo-old infants (5). Preferential reaching for a helper over a hindering agent has been documented in younger children in some studies (41) but not in another using a similar paradigm (14). The current study failed to find such a preference in older toddlers, suggesting early and strong individual, rather than group, differences in preferring a helper that are directly related to the neural dynamics processing of perceiving prosocial and antisocial characters.…”

“…of these propensities remains highly contentious (13)(14)(15). Interpreting preverbal infants and toddlers' behaviors and preferences has historically fallen into two camps: one advocating for lean interpretations based on rudimentary abilities/computations (16) and the other for rich interpretations based on complex cognitive and social cognitive processes (17).…”

Infants’ and Young Children’s Preferences for Prosocial over Antisocial Others

“…Yet, there are many aspects of the scenarios that infants could presumably use to distinguish prosocial from antisocial acts and individuals. For example, rather than reflecting the valence of the social interactions, infants' responses could be driven by low-level physical characteristics of helpful/fair versus unhelpful/unfair scenarios that infants like or dislike [e.g., particular types of movement; see Scarf, Imuta, Colombo, & Hayne, 2012]. To examine this, infants have been shown scenarios in which prosocial and antisocial characters perform similar or identical physical acts, but direct them towards objects instead of agents (e.g., characters push an inanimate circle up/down a hill, roll a ball toward/ take the ball away from a nonagentic claw, open/close a box with a claw, or place resources in front of objects).…”

Love Redirected: On Adam Smith's Love of Praiseworthiness

“…(Wynn 2008: 346) Although the evidence for moral evaluation in very young infants has been called into question (Salvadori et al 2015;Scarf et al 2012; see Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom 2012 for a reply), the idea that we are either born with a rudimentary moral compass or that we develop one early in childhood (Emde et al 1991) has support from others sources. There is research showing that toddlers as young as fourteen to eighteen months are 'naturally altruistic', and will tend to help others achieve their goals 'irrespective of any reward from adults' (Warneken and Tomasello 2009: 455), that infants as young as twelve months prefer equal to unequal distribution of goods among third parties and equal over unequal distributors (Geraci andSurian 2011: 1016-17), and that in fifteen-month-olds, a sensitivity to fair distribution is correlated with altruistic behaviour (Schmidt and Sommerville 2011: 5).…”