Just Babies Read Online Free PDF Page A

were capable of.
    Early in life, then, we are social animals, with a foundational appreciation of the minds of others.
    T HE study that got me started doing research into the moral life of babies wasn’t designed to look at morality at all. It was intended to explore the sophistication of babies’ social understanding. My colleagues and I were interested in whether babies could accurately predict how individuals would respond to someone who was either kind or cruel to them. In particular, we asked whether babies understand that individuals tend to approach those who have helped them and avoid those who have harmed them.
    This is a good place to note that all of the baby studies I have been involved in are carried out in the Yale InfantCognition Center, which is run by my colleague (and wife) Karen Wynn. These experiments are always done in collaboration with Karen and her team of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows.
    Before I get into our findings, I’ll give you a general sense of how this research takes place at the lab. A typical experiment takes about fifteen minutes and begins with the parent carrying his or her baby into a small testing room. Most of the time the parent sits on a chair with the baby on his or her lap, though sometimes the baby is strapped into a high chair with the parent standing behind. At this point, some of the babies are either sleeping or too fussy to continue; on average this kind of study ends up losing about a quarter of the participants. Just as critics describe much of experimental psychology as the study of the American college undergraduate who wants beer money, there’s some truth to the claim that a lot of developmental psychology is the study of the interested and alert baby.
    In our initial study, led by a then–postdoctoral fellow, Valerie Kuhlmeier, we needed to show babies nice and nasty interactions. The most obvious nasty interaction is one individual hitting another, but we worried that some parents—and possibly the Yale Human Subjects Committee—wouldn’t be comfortable with having the babies watch violent interactions. We decided, then, to draw uponprevious work by the psychologists David Premack and Ann Premack, who showed babies animated movies where one object either helped another squeeze through a gap or blocked another from getting through a gap. Theirfindings suggested that the babies viewed the helping acts as positive and the hindering acts as negative.
    Based on this research,we created animations in which geometrical figures helped or hindered one another. For example, a red ball was shown trying to go up a hill. In some instances, a yellow square went behind the ball and gently nudged it up the hill (helping); in others, a green triangle went in front of it and pushed it down (hindering). Next the babies saw movies in which the ball either approached the square or approached the triangle. This allowed us to explore their expectations about how the ball would act in the presence of these characters.
    We found that nine- and twelve-month-olds look longer when the ball approaches the character that hindered it, not the one that helped it. This effect was robust when the animated characters had eyes, making them look more like people, which supports the notion that these were bona fide social judgments on the part of the babies. (If the individuals had no eyes, the looking-time patterns flipped for the twelve-month-olds, and the effect disappeared for nine-month-olds—they looked at each scenario for the same amount of time.) This understanding seems to emerge at some point between six and nine months: a later study, using three-dimensional characters with faces, replicated the finding with a new sample of ten-month-olds but found no effect for six-month-olds.
    These studies explore babies’ expectations about how characters would act toward the helper and the hinderer, but they don’t tell us what babies themselves think