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Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Research Shows Babies Have Inherent Morality

This guy studied the infants...


I've noticed a series of studies suggesting that infants already have an inherent sense of morality, which corresponds to my Authoritarian Libertarian morality.

Numerous studies have shown that babies as early as 5-months already have an inherent morality understanding the basic tenets of right and wrong. One of the most striking studies has to do with a morality play between a toy trying to climb a hill, and a "hero" toy who helps him up and a "villain" toy who knocks him down. The babies were then asked which toy they wanted to play with the "good" toy or "bad" toy. 

According to Yale professor Paul Bloom,

In the end, we found that 6- and 10-month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual to the hindering individual. This wasn’t a subtle statistical trend; just about all the babies reached for the good guy.    
This of course suggests that babies as young as 6 months old already have a conception of morality and that this is possibly in-born like language.

It has other implications like that the weight of the evidence is towards Libertarian morality since humans are inherently moral.

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