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Nostalgia: Do Babies Recognize Good & Evil? · Why We Do What We Do

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: You're listening to Why we Do what we do. Welcome
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: to Why We Do what we Do. I am your
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: chaotic neutral host Abraham.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: And I am your oblivious to good and evil nuanced
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: host Shane.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: We are a psychology podcast. We talk about all of
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: the things that humans do, and sometimes we talk about
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: the things that humans do when they're just barely into
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: this world.
• 0:36
  Speaker 2: Yes, and so sometimes what we do too is we
• 0:39
  Speaker 2: do these episodes that we call nostalgia episodes. What we
• 0:42
  Speaker 2: like to do is because we are scientists and as
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: a general rule of science, is about five years old,
• 0:47
  Speaker 2: we should probably revisit the topic and make sure that
• 0:49
  Speaker 2: it's current or if there's new discoveries, and so we
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: do that with our episodes. And so this one is
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: an episode that we released many years ago and had
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: a lot of fun with, but we thought we would
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: re it and see if there is anything new that
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: you could learn from it.
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, So these nostalgia episodes, we're going to replay
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: the entire episode in its original format, and then we're
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: going to add to the end of that. When that
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: episode concludes, then what we'll do is we'll transition back
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: to a conversation here where we will then discuss some
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: of the more recent updates in research and developments of
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: the news and whatnot in terms of what has happened.
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  Speaker 1: I'm also realizing that for those of you who did
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: not catch it, my host Moniker today as a reference
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: to dungeons and dragons, if you are black, why did
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: he say that? So? Yeah, this episode, do babies recognize
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: good and evil? This was episode seventy seven. It originally
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  Speaker 1: published on October thirty first, twenty eighteen, but our re
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: release of this episode and subsequent follow up discussion is
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: being released five years and four months later and exactly
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: three hundred and thirty episodes later. On a February night,
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  Speaker 1: which is best Friend's Day.
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  Speaker 2: I love that, look at us. It's also Coast Guard
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  Speaker 1: Indeed, it is International Tug of War Day.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, make sure that you take care of your hands
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  Speaker 2: and they don't get you know, torn up, you don't
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  Speaker 2: get rope burn.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: And don't play a squid game version Tug of War.
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  Speaker 1: That's not nice.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's not nice at all. It's Ebo Jima Day.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Okay. It is National air Boat day.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: We're celebrating in Florida. I'll tell you that. It's National
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  Speaker 2: Arabian Horse Day.
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: Mmm.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Okay. It is National Chocolate Mint Day.
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: Ooh. I like that. It's National Lashes Day. I think
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: this is specifically referring to eyelashes and not other types
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  Speaker 2: of lashes.
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  Speaker 1: I was gonna say, like lashes in the public square
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  Speaker 1: type lashes.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's just go with eyelashes. That seems nicer.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: I agree. I think that's a better lash that we
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: would want to celebrate. Yes, it is Prevent Plagiarism Day
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  Speaker 1: you ai bots?
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, it is Vet Girls Rock Day.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: It is Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia Staff Education Week. Shane.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: Did you know that Alzheimer's does not have a tea
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  Speaker 1: in it?
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: I did when I wrote this out.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: A lot of people pronounce it with the tea, and
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  Speaker 1: neurologists those around me and my family have corrected that,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: and indeed it does not have a tea. It is
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: Alzheimer's Alzheimer's.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Yes, it is Bird Health Awareness Week, so take care
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: of them birds.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: That's right, feed them good foods and not bad foods. Yeah.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: It is Love Teaching Week. I love that week.
• 3:36
  Speaker 2: I also love that week. It is Make Mine Chocolate Week.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: I guess we're of the fallout of Valentine's Day still,
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: but yes, chocolate good. Yes, And also relatedly to Valentine's
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: it is National Condom Week.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: It is take care of Yourself and also related to
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: Valentine's its National Pancake Week. I mean maybe it is
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: doing breakfast. I don't know.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, great Valentine's that's awesome. And then also a
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: National Sauna Week.
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  Speaker 2: That's so fun. It's a good week for self care
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  Speaker 2: it sounds like.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, apparently, and group care in a way too. Yes,
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  Speaker 1: so we don't just talk about holidays though, we're actually
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  Speaker 1: here to talk about babies again, sort of related to
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  Speaker 1: Valentine's Day. I guess we're gonna play this episode that
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: we're going to come back and talk about some follow
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: up research as we mentioned already. But I would also
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  Speaker 1: first time, welcome. My hope that you get to enjoy
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  Speaker 1: this oldie of ours. This is actually recorded back when
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: one of our hosts was also Miranda, who I thought
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  Speaker 1: was did a great job and a really good host here,
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  Speaker 1: and it was the three of us, you and Miranda
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  Speaker 1: out of this and at the very least, as I said,
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  Speaker 1: we do have new content toward the end. You will
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  Speaker 1: on those after we have played this whole episode for you.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: So I think that is all we have to kick
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  Speaker 1: it off. Is there anything you'd like to add before
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  Speaker 1: we launch into this one?
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  Speaker 2: No, I think I feel I think we're ready.
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  Speaker 1: All right, do babies recognize good and evil? And go,
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: this is Abraham, this is Marianda, and this is Shane,
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  Speaker 1: And so we get to have a fun conversation about
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  Speaker 1: babies and what they do and what they think.
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  Speaker 4: That sort of thing, what they inherently are.
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  Speaker 1: What they inherently are. Actually wanted to do an episode
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  Speaker 1: on various stages of child development, and I don't think
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  Speaker 1: it needs to be like a series like we'll do
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: like let's just tackle just a neuter row. Let's just
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: go over that sort of thing. What's important about that
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: is that and as we're going to talk about in
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  Speaker 1: our discussion today, babies are sort of constantly developing regardless
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  Speaker 1: of what that environment. So they're fairly well insulated when
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  Speaker 1: they're in the womb. They aren't getting a whole lot
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  Speaker 1: of exposure to all of the circumstances of life just yet,
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  Speaker 1: which is good for a lot of reasons. And they
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  Speaker 1: also don't have a lot of the biological equipment necessary
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  Speaker 1: while they're in the womb to have a lot of
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  Speaker 1: those experiences be meaningful even if they were. But they
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  Speaker 1: are still developing, and they are still developing in the
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  Speaker 1: context of that environment, which does include some things like
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  Speaker 1: the food that they get and the sound that they
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  Speaker 1: get in the relative temperatures and all of that sort
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  Speaker 1: of stuff. Those are things that are going to influence
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  Speaker 1: a small amount to their degree. And then once they're
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  Speaker 1: out in the world and getting to experience the full
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  Speaker 1: context of the universe, even from a relatively sheltered perspective,
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  Speaker 1: being constantly bombarded by those experiences, right, that are going
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  Speaker 1: to be Those are the things that start to shape
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  Speaker 1: who they are early on. So a lot of people
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  Speaker 1: wanted to know are we born good? That's the question, right,
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  Speaker 1: are people inherently good? And how would we know if
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  Speaker 1: we didn't look at babies. The hypothesis then is that, well,
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  Speaker 1: I'll starry with a hypothesis. Let's actually start with the question,
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  Speaker 1: as I said, is if people are inherently good, if
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  Speaker 1: they're inherently bad, or if they are just neutral? And
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  Speaker 1: how would we know? Right, that's sort of the point
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  Speaker 1: of this discussion, and specifically to review I call them studies.
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  Speaker 1: But some things that people have done that were an
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  Speaker 1: attempt to answer that question or ask that question in
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  Speaker 1: such a way that they believed they could derive an
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  Speaker 1: answer from the way that they asked it. So let's
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  Speaker 1: go ahead and begin there. And first, a lot of
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  Speaker 1: this is being pulled from a book, The Moral Life
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  Speaker 1: of Babies by Paul Bloom, which we'll link to in
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  Speaker 1: the show notes, and a quick review of that book
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  Speaker 1: by an author named Jenny Vadich wrote that in Blim's book,
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  Speaker 1: he's asking the question, do babies have an innate quote
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  Speaker 1: unquote moral sense where they can discriminate between acts of
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  Speaker 1: kindness and acts or performances or behaviors that are mean
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  Speaker 1: or in a sense maybe evil. And he suggests in
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  Speaker 1: this book that certain moral senses are innate, And then
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  Speaker 1: he also has the caveat that babies are born with
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  Speaker 1: underdeveloped and limited capacities for morality, so maybe something's there. Well,
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  Speaker 1: he certainly proposes that it is, and we just don't
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  Speaker 1: know how much of it is there. He compares this
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  Speaker 1: with our ability as humans to be caring and compassionate
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  Speaker 1: toward one another, but we also have the ability to
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  Speaker 1: act selfishly in an anti social way, so to an extent,
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  Speaker 1: according to him, seems to be dependent on conditions and
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  Speaker 1: behavioral situations.
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  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, no, for sure, And I think some of
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  Speaker 2: the discussion around the idea that babies are evil or
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  Speaker 2: God seems to come from like it, like just kind
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  Speaker 2: of this discussion here where you're talking about the moral
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  Speaker 2: of babies and they depended on the condition and behavioral situations.
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  Speaker 2: I think is it kind of a newer, more modern
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  Speaker 2: take on it? For sure? I like the I like
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  Speaker 2: that it feels like it comes from that philosophy background
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  Speaker 2: though a little bit like the idea of like tabla
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  Speaker 2: rossa and forms and all that stuff. I think that's
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  Speaker 2: really cool to kind of hear that in us kind
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  Speaker 2: of go no, not so much.
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  Speaker 1: Right. So, a number of people have suggested that humans
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  Speaker 1: have the sense of moral right and wrong from the
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  Speaker 1: very start in life, and we'll go over some of
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  Speaker 1: their investigations, if you will, to try and parse that out.
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  Speaker 1: I think I do want to stop and pause just
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  Speaker 1: for the moment and have a quick discussion about the
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  Speaker 1: languaging nature of the idea of morality of right and wrong.
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  Speaker 1: And so people point out a lot of examples. You
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  Speaker 1: hear something like if a lion tackles a gazelle and
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  Speaker 1: kills it, is that immoral And most people will say no,
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  Speaker 1: because that's what the lion does. That's it's just it's
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  Speaker 1: an animal and it has to eat, and that's how
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: it eats. And that's part of how life has evolved
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: on this planet is some life is predatory, in some
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  Speaker 1: life is not. And so if we separate the act
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  Speaker 1: from the language, it's not moral or immoral. It's just
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  Speaker 1: a thing that happens. And so when we start talking
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  Speaker 1: about morality, it is important, I think, to identify that
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  Speaker 1: it is based that idea of right and wrong. There
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  Speaker 1: is no inherent right and wrong in the universe. Things
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  Speaker 1: just are. The only time that they become right and
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  Speaker 1: wrong is when we assign meaning to them with our language,
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  Speaker 1: with our verbal behavior, and with our culture that we
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  Speaker 1: have developed around those things that we have to we
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  Speaker 1: have to interact with it in a particular way. And
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: so things that are right and wrong come from a
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  Speaker 1: human perspective based on the way that we talk about
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  Speaker 1: it inside of our cultures and our shared experiences and
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  Speaker 1: that sort of thing right and.
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  Speaker 5: These sound like fairly complex behavior to engage in. Right, So,
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  Speaker 5: if we're thinking about a little baby, and these experiments
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  Speaker 5: that have been proposed that attempt to observe these moral thoughts,
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  Speaker 5: moral judgments, moral.
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  Speaker 6: Feelings from these babies.
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  Speaker 5: We're talking about some pretty complex behavior that's trying to
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  Speaker 5: be observed in very young children.
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  Speaker 1: Right. So some of these experiments, these investigations, if you will,
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  Speaker 1: they've proposed to allow for the possibility of observing moral thoughts,
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  Speaker 1: moral judgments, and moral feelings from their participants. In this
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  Speaker 1: particular case, we're talking about infants, and so even in
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  Speaker 1: the first year of life, they believe that they can
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  Speaker 1: derive some meaning about the extent to which humans come
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  Speaker 1: prepared with a sense of good and bad.
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  Speaker 2: One of the quotes that we had writer is kind
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  Speaker 2: of this idea that some sense of good and evil
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: seems to be bred in the bone, which essentially means
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: that it's not to say that parents should be so
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  Speaker 2: overwhelmingly concentrated with moral development or assume they're in interactions
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  Speaker 2: in naturing other child will be a waste of time.
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  Speaker 2: What we're really looking at here is the idea that
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  Speaker 2: there is some kind of inherent morality that is is
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  Speaker 2: almost like a template that's already created for the baby.
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  Speaker 2: Right the baby comes out and they already have like
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  Speaker 2: this like sense of the world that's a pretty complex
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  Speaker 2: sense of the world, and it's not entirely this nurture argument.
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  Speaker 1: Right, and still pointing out that the nurture part of
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  Speaker 1: it is critical for the development of sort of healthy
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  Speaker 1: socialization and the parts of the babies, and on that
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: note adds, all right, so let's get back to this
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  Speaker 1: previous conversation. Throughout history we sort of began with this,
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: but just to revisit this, some people have had some
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  Speaker 1: choice words for describing the extent to which there is
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: good and badness in babies, or at least as an
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  Speaker 1: inherent part of being human. Jean Jacques Rousseau in seventeen
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  Speaker 1: sixty two described the baby as or a baby as
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  Speaker 1: quote a perfect idiot end quote? Was that unflattering statement?
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  Speaker 2: Was he talking about a single baby that he had met,
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  Speaker 2: or just babies in general?
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  Speaker 1: Oh, you know, that's a good question. It might have
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  Speaker 1: been just one.
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  Speaker 4: This baby is so dumb.
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  Speaker 5: In eighteen sixty nine, Alfred Russell Wallace, who along with
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  Speaker 5: Darwin discovered natural selection, he wrote that quote, certain human capacities,
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  Speaker 5: including the moral higher faculties, are richer than what you
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  Speaker 5: could expect from the product of biological evolution. Some godly
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  Speaker 5: force must intervene to create these capacities.
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  Speaker 6: End quote.
• 13:42
  Speaker 4: What does that mean?
• 13:44
  Speaker 5: So it's interesting, right, So you know these are throughout history.
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  Speaker 5: This isn't a novel kind of exploration and trying to
• 13:52
  Speaker 5: attempt to account for moral behavior.
• 13:56
  Speaker 6: Right.
• 13:56
  Speaker 5: So this scientist who assisted in coining out in discovering
• 14:04
  Speaker 5: natural selection even had difficulty trying to grasp the concept
• 14:09
  Speaker 5: of morality within a more pragmatic framework.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, without having to appeal to mystical ideas exactly.
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And then in eighteen ninety William James actually described
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: the mental life of a baby as one great, blooming,
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: buzzing confusion, which I think that probably aligns more with
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: how we understand babies today, maybe a little bit. It's
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: just kind of a lot of overwhelming stimuli hitting that
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: baby at the same time, and they're just trying to
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: make sense of any of it at all.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: Many developmental psychologists believe that ignorance can extend into childhood
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: and that humans can take a very long time to
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: acquire basic knowledge. I think that same as relatively intuitive
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: to me, but that is also something that other people
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: apparently find intuitive.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: And the reason for this could be due to the
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: ability to study the mental life of babies. So considering
• 14:57
  Speaker 2: babies lack language, and their behaviors are limited until specific age.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: Those are things to look at as far as the
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: mental life of babies, But also they cannot engage in
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: the same behaviors say a rat or a bird can, Like,
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: they can't do the same types of things like lever
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: pressing or pecking or anything like that.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I also can't do the same thing as like
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: a whale and holding my breath underwater for hours at
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: a time. But I guess that's because of my species barrier.
• 15:22
  Speaker 4: That's neither here nor there.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, that's like, why point that out, I guess.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: In the nineteen eighties, there was a couple of researchers,
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: Elizabeth Spelke and Renee Baylor Jin. They conducted studies with babies.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: They wanted to discover what babies knew about the nature
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: and working of physical objects. A lot of people refer
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: to general behavior of babies as that of little I
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: guess physicists because they can move things around. So hey, everyone,
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: we're all physicists. Congrats. So anyway, then their experiments, they
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: wanted to ask the question, how do we know what
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: babies are thinking? If they like or don't like something,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: if they understand what's going going on. And I think
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: that's actually a great point to stop right here and
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: just ask how would we know if a baby likes
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: or dislike something or understands the complexity of it.
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  Speaker 5: Well, you can just we can just ask them, right
• 16:09
  Speaker 5: and we can just kind of interview them about it,
• 16:11
  Speaker 5: and they can just kind of tell us like, yeah, no,
• 16:13
  Speaker 5: that's not cool.
• 16:15
  Speaker 6: This thing though awesome, that.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: Would be convenient, that would be unfortunate. Unfortunately, no formula,
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: no thanks, MRI is not going to do is very
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: much good because there's not really anything to interpret because
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: we can't get any other any correlation to what's going
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: on in the brain and what they are like thinking
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: or doing or like they're not saying anything, So we
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: can't see what's happening in the situations to see if
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: they understand what we're even asking them in the first place.
• 16:40
  Speaker 6: Right exactly. So what is there to measure and observe?
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: Well, one thing I think I probably would not rely
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: on because it seems so tenuous and ridiculous is how
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: long they look at something as a measure of their
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: preference or understanding of that thing. So let's see what
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: they did, you is instead so similar to adults, baby
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: seem to hesitate after a situation. I don't know why
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: this is similar to adults. I think maybe adults reacts
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: in somewhat different ways for a lot of reasons. But
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: in situations like performing a magic trick where something seems
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: to disappear and moving away it's not supposed to, they
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: look longer at scenes that differ, and also if they
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: violate those physics, so apparently they do rely on how
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: long they look at something for some reason. A suggestion
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: of this is that babies possess expectations about how objects
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: in their physical environment should behave. This contradicts what researchers
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: thought previously and that and instead proposes that babies think
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: of objects similarly as adults to so they're just little
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: little versions of adults sort of the way that I'm
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: reading this. Okay, so let's just take a moment, very brief,
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: I'll just say really quickly, So the babies possess expectations
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: about how these objects are supposed to move. Okay, So
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: if a baby has seen something work in a particular
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: way and then it works in a different way, that
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: would be somewhat surprising. I would know that the baby
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: was surprised. It might look at it for a long
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: period of time or a short period of time, and
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: either way you could justify they looked away because it
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: was surprising, or they looked at it because it was surprising,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: and the hypothesis fits either one of those. That conclusion
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: fits either either one of those those situations, because it
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter. It's a coclusion based
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: on nothing. So you could say, like if they also
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: spontaneously floated up in the air, it was because that
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: they were surprised, and I you know, whatever happens, your
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: explanation can't be wrong. It is unfalsifiable, which automatically makes
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: it a relatively weak candidate. Now that's not to say
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: that maybe they are surprised. That could be a thing,
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: and maybe they're surprised because the things are different. We
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: just don't know specifically because of how long they looked
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: at it. If that's the case.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I keep going back to the statement
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: talking about how they may look at scenes longer. I
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: tend to do that because I'm just kind of curious
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: about what's changed or what's different, or maybe it's new
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: stimuli that I'm absorbing. But that doesn't mean that you know,
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking one way or another about it. Maybe I'm
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: just like it goes back to that like buzzing bloom
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: of confusion, where like, even as an adult, new information
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: to me is is still this buzzing bloom of confusion
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: until I can organize it in a way that makes
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: sense to me.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: We often stare at car accidents as we're driving down
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: the freeway, not because we prefer them, but because they
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: are unique and significant events that happen, and often because
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: we don't understand what's happening, and so we're gazing at
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: something trying to figure out what's happening. Not that's necessarily
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: what a baby is doing, but there are just there
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: are so many reasons to gaze at something for an
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: extended period of time, how to draw conclusions about what
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: those reasons are because the fact that it's happening seems
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: spurious at best.
• 19:47
  Speaker 4: I like Miranda's example of interviewing them though.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, just ask them.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: Why hasn't anyone tried this?
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: Paper pencil surveys are great for babies.
• 19:58
  Speaker 6: Could just give them a LIKERD skill.
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: Well, they can do physics, so they it certainly should
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: seem to be able to answer a simple question there.
• 20:06
  Speaker 5: So there were actually some other sudden He's conducted in
• 20:08
  Speaker 5: the nineteen nineties by Bloom and his wife Karen, and
• 20:13
  Speaker 5: they found so that's the author of this book that
• 20:15
  Speaker 5: we're discussing, and they actually found that babies can do
• 20:19
  Speaker 5: rudimentary math with objects. WHOA, we're all born mathematicians, so
• 20:27
  Speaker 5: they say, quote, The demonstration is simple. Show a baby
• 20:30
  Speaker 5: in empty stage, raise a screen to obscure part of
• 20:33
  Speaker 5: the stage and view.
• 20:34
  Speaker 6: Of the baby.
• 20:35
  Speaker 5: Put a Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. Then put
• 20:38
  Speaker 5: another Mickey Mouse doll behind the screen. Now drop the screen.
• 20:42
  Speaker 5: Adults expect two dolls, and so do five month olds.
• 20:45
  Speaker 5: If the screen drops to reveal one or three dolls,
• 20:47
  Speaker 5: the babies look longer in surprise, and then they do
• 20:51
  Speaker 5: if the screen drops to reveal two.
• 20:54
  Speaker 6: End quote.
• 20:55
  Speaker 4: So babies are fascinated with magic.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Weird. I don't know. I don't know if they're surprised
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: you do have Mickey Mouse dolls. I guess they're saying
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: they look longer than if they didn't.
• 21:08
  Speaker 6: So there's if there are more things to look.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: At than others. Yeah, does that mean that they're surprised
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: or there are there's something unique about the situation. I
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know how to interpret that, Like
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: why why throw this? Why would the conclusion be if
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: they look at something for slightly longer that they're doing math?
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: You know? I think that the generally things changing rapidly
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: in a way that's inconsistent with how they've generally experienced
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: things in life changing. Then that would be because if
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: you can do the simple thought experiment, imagine that constantly
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: in your environment, things just sort of shift, change and move.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Quantities will be more and less Like that might be
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: a little disorienting, but you probably get used to it
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: after a while, Like they're just they're things that are
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: sometimes they're sometimes not. Sometimes more of them, sometimes you
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: are them, And when you look at once, then they're there,
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: and you look back and there are more of them.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: That sort of thing. Eventually you just you stop reacting
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: to that as something that's different. And so if you've
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: been only around an environment where things don't change in
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: that way, then when they do change in that way,
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: that would be surprising, right, I mean, does that make sense?
• 22:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 22:19
  Speaker 4: I think it's a I think it's a stretch to
• 22:20
  Speaker 4: call that math like. I just I don't see how
• 22:23
  Speaker 4: that's like.
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: I don't see how that's those are even rudimentary math skills.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: I see that as as very much so, hey, this
• 22:30
  Speaker 2: is my environment and it makes sense now and then
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: oh there's something new. And I would argue that there's
• 22:34
  Speaker 2: probably something It would be interesting to see this type
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: of like type of experiment in a culture where Mickey
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: Mouse does not exist, because I think that that might
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: be variable to look at too. I still don't see
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: how it relates to math.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you it. If if they can show me
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: that these five month old babies, when they take the
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: screen away and then maybe it turns out and goes, hey,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: there used to be two of them and now there's
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: only one, I will be convince and utterly and entirely
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: that they are doing math.
• 23:02
  Speaker 6: That will convince we saying, just ask them to do
• 23:04
  Speaker 6: the math.
• 23:05
  Speaker 2: Right. If this baby turns around and says, what the hell,
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: then we don't know if it's math or they're just
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: surprised by magic, or if they just wanted more dolls.
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: We don't know that they need to be more specific exactly.
• 23:16
  Speaker 5: And the rest of this you know, so it's an
• 23:18
  Speaker 5: empty stage and then things appear, so there's nothing really
• 23:22
  Speaker 5: competing for their attention. Right, they're going to orient towards action.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: It's very true. It's a good point keeps giving ahead
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: because you keep you started with the conclusion that we
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: just need to ask them, and now we're talking about
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: things that we're about to discuss. You're so ahead of
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: the curve, Miranda. Okay, So some other questions that might
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: come up in terms of how we're going to interact
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: with babies and whether they have this naive inner sense
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: of inherence wisdom about the universe and things that are good,
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: the sort of naive morality. Morality differs from physics or
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: psychology because there aren't necessarily universal truths about it. As
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: we mentioned, this is culturally bound, social sort of thing,
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: and so these things like moral codes, they vary from
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: place to place. Something that is moral in one place
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: is a moral in another, and that sort of thing.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: People everywhere have different sort of mindsets, goals, desires, beliefs, personalities, cultures, norms,
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: those sorts of things. And so there's a study conducted
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: by Joseph Heinrich and colleagues in which they came to
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: the conclusion that the morality humans possess is the consequence
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: of the culture in which they're brought up, and not
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: they're innate capacities of what is right and wrong.
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: All right, So while we lay this baby down for
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: a quick nap, let's take an ad break, and we're back.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: So it seems to sort of undermine this idea that
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: there is a capacity for right and wrong. There also
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: seems to be some idea that there are feelings of
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: compassion that emerge early in life that are universal in
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: human development. And I mean, there are things that all humans,
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: almost all humans are going to do that are are
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: relatively simple. And once you get past those things that
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: are relatively simple and necessary for survival, you start seeing
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: pretty remarkable variability. And so almost all humans are going
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: to have the capacity to eat and sleep and generally
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: responds to stimulating their environment. And then after that it
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: starts getting just very nuanced.
• 25:25
  Speaker 5: Based on the situation, there are some researchers that have
• 25:28
  Speaker 5: apparently demonstrated what they have defined as empathy being observed
• 25:33
  Speaker 5: in both young babies and even rats.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Right, I mean, apparently apparently we're going past that species
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: border now and we've moved to you know, the thing
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: that's unique about humans that we can tell good from evil.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: Now it's just it's a thing that's not unique anymore.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: And rats apparently have morality, So then we now can
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: say that lions. If rats also have empathy, then maybe
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: lions also have empathy, and so there is something moral
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: and immoral about killing a gazelle. Take that line no more,
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Gauzel's for you.
• 26:03
  Speaker 4: They made a good argument.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: But I would like to meet a vegan lion and
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: see how that turns out.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: Better meet it early on in nets process, because it
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: won't be around very much longer obligate carnivores, all right.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: So so the example kind of talking about rats and
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: empathy is when in a given situation, if a rat
• 26:22
  Speaker 2: here's another rat scream. This causes the first rat to stress,
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: So that that could mean a couple of different things.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: I don't know if that that specifically means that the
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: rat is stressed because of the scream. It might be
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: that there's some inherent danger in the environment that the
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: rat is that that that that scream kind of signals
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: oncoming danger. I don't know that it really speaks to
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: to empathy in that regard. I mean, what do you
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: guys think.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: This is the thing that I always have questions about
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: what these sort of social experiments is. You look at
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: a thing that happens and then derive a cause or
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: reason for that thing that happens without any other evidence
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: than the fact that it happened in the first place.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: This is part of the reason we re aired that
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: episode on circular reasoning is because of things like this
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: that come up, where if the rat screams when they
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: hear a sound of another rat screaming, you can you
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: can reach all kinds of conclusions for why that might
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: be the case. You might decide that the rat has
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: a particular neuron that as soon as they hear a
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: rat scream that they immediately freak out, like they have
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: a scream neuron. You could say that there is an
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: invisible elf that whenever they hear a rat scream, they
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: poke the near a strat that that's there to make
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: it uncomfortable. You could and like any anything you come
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: up with that could possibly be related to the situation
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: is going to work because it's just a way of
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: describing that situation, and it's just circular reasoning. You have
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: no other evidence for it than the fact that it happened.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: And to begin with the fact that happens means that
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: your conclusion is inevitable because you can literally say anything
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: that seems to be even tangentially related. And they give
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: the example too, when babies cry, then other babies tend
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: to cry, and so that means that they have empathy.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: I'm like, we don't know, we don't know what's going
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: on there, Like why not say that they're pissed off
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: because the other babies are crying, Like I'm trying to
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: get some sleep here, and so the baby's like crying
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: to be like the jerk over there is keeping me up.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to get some sleep. Oh, rather than there
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: they're feeling empathy, Like, we just don't know. It could
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: be so many things, and so to reach that conclusion
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: seems again you're just sort of making stuff up.
• 28:20
  Speaker 4: It's like you're forcing the puzzle piece to fit.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: I have these three different puzzles from three different boxes,
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: and I'm just gonna start grabbing pieces and just glowing
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: them together.
• 28:28
  Speaker 4: Babies and rats and baby rats.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: Now we have to study all these things tall order.
• 28:34
  Speaker 5: And in addition to all that, you know, they've actually
• 28:36
  Speaker 5: started to look a little bit at altruistic behavior and toddlers.
• 28:40
  Speaker 6: So going even further.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: That gets us really to what we were meant to
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: talk about, which is some of these investigations that have
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: tried to look at the morality of babies. And so
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: there's a couple of different experiments, one where they use
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: a sort of movie and one where they use puppets.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: And I'm just going to briefly describe how they do
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: this movie, and essentially the way that this movie is
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: set up. There's some animated shapes and they have faces.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: So if you got like a triangle and a square
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: in a circle, and there are also different colors, maybe
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: in case the infinite colorblind, or maybe just so that
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: they can really clearly tell them apart whatever, have different faces,
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: and essentially what you have is one shape is pushing
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: a ball like up a hill, and another shape comes
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: and pushes the ball down back down the hill. Okay,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: so essentially one ball, one shape is trying to do
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: something and the other shape is trying to hinder that
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: one doing it. And then what they do is they
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: bring these shapes on a tray to these nine and
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: twelve month olds and they and they'll bring it to them,
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: and they're looking at whether they approach the one that
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: was the helper, the one that was pushing the ball
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: up the hill, or the hinder, or the one that
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: was trying to stop the one or say trying to
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: stop but stopping the one from pushing it up the
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: hill and pushing it back down the hill. Then what
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: they did is they showed that the next scene, you
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: would have the ball and whether the ball approaches the
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: one that was pushing it up the hill or approaches
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: the one that was pushing it down the hill. Okay,
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: and then they the nine to twelve months old, they're
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: going to look at one of these things, and they
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: tend to look longer when the ball approached the one
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: that was supposed to be the helper pushing it up
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: the hill, versus approached when the ball approached the hinder
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: or the one that was pushing it down the hill.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: And the interpretation from this is that if they approach
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: there's a couple different ways that this could be interpreted
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: that both of them happen. If they approach the one
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: that is the helper, then they might look at it
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: longer because they prefer it because it makes sense. If
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: they approach the one that is the hinderer, then they
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: might look at it longer because it surprises them, and
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: so they expect to they would expect the ball to
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: approach the one that is the helper. And so again
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: doesn't matter really what showed what happened in the study,
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: because you can just layer over language on top of it,
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: like they were surprised or they preferred it, and it fits.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: It fits whatever your outcome is going to be. And
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: so you know, if you already have your conclusion to
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: begin with, then any results are going to fit whatever
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: that conclusion is. Doesn't It doesn't really matter what they are.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: Because if your conclusion was that babies are inherently good,
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: so therefore they're going to prefer the one that's the helper,
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: then when they go to the one that's the hinderer
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: and they watched, they look at that one more than like, see,
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: babies are inherently good because they're surprised at the and
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: we just i mean, we don't know. It's just there's
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: there's way too many reasons for them to look at
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: something for it to be that for that to necessarily
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: be the reason. Whereas to have any amount of confidence
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: that that's the best explanation. They did say also that
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: with six months olds, they seem to have very little
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: expectations about this, and that it was it was really
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: only robust when the animal when those animated characters had faces,
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: but not if they didn't have faces.
• 31:47
  Speaker 5: I do think it's interesting that this potentially might demonstrate
• 31:51
  Speaker 5: some sort of development. You know, and what we know
• 31:54
  Speaker 5: as far as you know, horbrudimentary language starts developed between
• 31:58
  Speaker 5: nine and twelve months old. It seem somewhat consistent that,
• 32:01
  Speaker 5: you know, something that's going on there might support some
• 32:05
  Speaker 5: sort of approach response based on what was previously observed.
• 32:10
  Speaker 6: What that actually means, I think is still a question.
• 32:12
  Speaker 5: But you know, you look at a nine, ten, eleven,
• 32:17
  Speaker 5: twelve month old baby, there is certainly some language and
• 32:22
  Speaker 5: some more advanced development that's happening versus you know, a
• 32:24
  Speaker 5: six of four or five six month old baby.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: Right. Yeah, that's a great point. Well, I'll talk to
• 32:28
  Speaker 1: that a little bit more further on, but just visiting
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: the point that they are learning things up to the
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: point where they've they've been exposed to the experiment, like
• 32:39
  Speaker 1: we're not actually taking a baby that's like, well, you've
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: been raised in a vacuum sealed container where you weren't
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: exposed to any kind of circumstances up into this point.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: It's they've been around for a few months, some of
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: them almost a couple of years, and so they have
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: been exposed to some amount of language and culture and
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: stimuli things that they're used to in a certain way,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: so that those would be reliably those would reliably predict
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: what their performance might be. And that's why I'd much
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: prefer to seeing the experiment set up where they are
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: deliberately looking at how do we change how do we
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: change this, and how can we account for this by
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: the things that we're doing, and not appealing to something
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: that must inherently be inside them causing them to act
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: this way.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: So we're gonna look into like kind of some other
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: investigations and baby morality as well. So there was a
• 33:29
  Speaker 2: study conducted at Yale University in the Infant Cognition Center,
• 33:32
  Speaker 2: and essentially what they did was they looked at the
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: parent or the parent took the child into the room
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: where the experiment was being conducted, and the parent typically
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: sat with the child or the child was put into
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: a high chair, and the parents sat behind the child.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: So in one of the studies of moral evaluation, the
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: researchers used three dimensional animated movies kind of similar to
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: what we talked about before with the shapes and the
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: hinderers and the helpers, And what they did in this
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: circumstance is that they looked at these real geometrical objects,
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: manipulated puppets, and acted out the helping and hindering situations.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: Like we discussed before, the yellow square helped put helped
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: the circle up the hill, the red triangle pushed the
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: circle down the hill. So once the babies were finished watching,
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: the experimenter put the helper in the hinder or the
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: triangle in the square on the tray and brought them
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: to the child. So in the previous study, the researchers
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: examined looking at and looking time like how long they
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: were looking at the objects, but in this experiment they
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: looked at.
• 34:21
  Speaker 4: Which shape the child the child would reach for.
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: So at the end of all this, what they actually
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: found was that the experiment has found that six to
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: ten month old infants overwhelmingly preferred helpful individual, the helpful individual,
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: the helpful the helping shape to the hindering individual. And
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: this wasn't a subtle statistical trend. Just about all the
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: babies reached for the good guy.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: So there might be some amount of concern about whether
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: they preferred the shape or the color of the of
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: the thing, and that that was the reason that they
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: were reaching for. So I'm glad that that was something
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: that they factored into their I guess interpretation of this.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: So to try and control of this possibility, they actually
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: switched them so half of the baby's got the yellow
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: square as the helper and the other got the yellow
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: square as the hinderers. They had those switched around, and.
• 35:04
  Speaker 5: They also attempted to control for you know, any sort
• 35:07
  Speaker 5: of unconscious quing. So the experimenter holding the tray had
• 35:10
  Speaker 5: not seen the puppet show, so they didn't know who
• 35:12
  Speaker 5: was actually bad or good when the puppet show was presented.
• 35:16
  Speaker 5: And also the parents were to close their eyes when
• 35:19
  Speaker 5: the experimenter offered the tray selection to the child.
• 35:22
  Speaker 4: Very cool.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: I wonder if they accounted for like position bias at all,
• 35:27
  Speaker 2: like or if the six month old baby was left
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: handed or right handed right, I mean not that that's
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: like the enod all be all of this of this
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: particular investigation. But all right, so after this experiment, the
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: researchers were interested in understanding the baby's preferences. So did
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: the babies act this way because they were attracted to
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: the helpful individual or because they were repelled by the
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: hinder or was it both?
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: So?
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: To control for this and another experiment, they added a
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: neutral character, and this character neither helped nor hindered. What
• 35:54
  Speaker 2: they found in this particular experiment indicated that babies preferred
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: the helpful the helpful person and over the neutral, and
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: prefer the neutral over the hinderer. And so these results
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: again were not subtle. They almost always demonstrated that baby
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: showed up the pattern of preferring the good guy over
• 36:10
  Speaker 2: the bad guy.
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: All right, The authors pointed out that this research doesn't
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: necessarily show that babies always believe that the helpful character
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: is good and the hindering character is bad. They say,
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: all we can safely infer from what the baby's reached
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: for is that babies prefer the good guy and shown
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: a version to the bad guy. And quoting them there
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: we interrupt to this program to bring you ads more
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: riveting details about babies. Now, I'm not sure that we
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: can safely infer that what we can say is that
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: we show them this video and they tended to reach
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: for this character from the video more often than the others.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: That can mean a lot of things. I would tend
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: to believe, based on what they've already done, that if
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: they had reached for the hinderer, that they would make
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: the argument instead that they were suspicious and wanted to
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: like keep it away from the good guy or something
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: like that. Because again, you can say anything you want,
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: You can say anything you want. But again, all we
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: can really safely infer from this is exactly what we
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: observed happen, and I don't think we can say anything
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: about their morality about it beyond that personally.
• 37:16
  Speaker 5: It is interesting though, because their conclusions and their actual
• 37:20
  Speaker 5: experimental design was far more conservative than the other research,
• 37:27
  Speaker 5: the other ways that people have explored this.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely pres do. But yeah, no, that's a great point,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: and I agree with you, and I think that it's
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: just even if we were to like have a wave
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: of really being more clear on this, I'm not sure
• 37:43
  Speaker 1: what we do with that information, you know what I mean,
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure what that really tells us about this.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: So anyway, we'll go ahead and move on to the
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: next study that was done. That they were again try
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: to increase the confidence that they were responding to niceness
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: and naughtiness, so to researchers. When Hamlin, they conducted a
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: series of setups and call them studies, I guess, in
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: which they created these different sets of one act morality
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: plays brought to you by Shakespeare. And in one series,
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: the individual struggle to open a box. The lid would
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: be partially opened but then fall back down. You can
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: actually find this clip on YouTube linked to it in the
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: show notes, and then on alternating trials, one puppet would
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: grab the lid and open it all the way and
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: another puppet would jump on the box and slam it down.
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: So in here there are so many different ways to
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: interpret what's good and what's bad. And that's actually one
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: thing that I was I was curious about with the
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: shapes as well, is is we're like, what if the
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: one that is slamming it down, like that's actually it's
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: it's property, it's trying to protect it, right.
• 38:43
  Speaker 6: Or there's a snake in the box, like exactly how
• 38:46
  Speaker 6: we were a good thing to do.
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the thing in the box is bad. So we're
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: trying to keep it locked away so we can't hurt
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: the other one, Like we're we're super imposing the idea
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: that what's happening is moral or immoral on the surface,
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: when none of it is moral immoral on the surface. Really, Like,
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: what could happened is on the other one that thing
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: was pushing up the hill and the other one's pushing
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: it down the hill. Well, what if the other one
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: was like taking it away from where it was supposed
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: to be and the other one was putting it back.
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: They if the intention isn't clear, and all you simply
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: have is that one thing is moving in another thing
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: is moving, then there is no inherent moral position that
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: one could attend to one here. So that's just that's
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: one question I had about the setup and how useful
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: this is, and trying to understand whether or not what
• 39:26
  Speaker 1: they're doing is moral and moral on its very face.
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I like every one of those setups is exactly it.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: It's like every one of them is inherently neutral until we.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: Give it mean exactly, and the baby has no frame
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: of reference for giving it meaning. And so the fact
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: that the reach for one more than the other doesn't
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: really tell us anything about whether or not there was
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: inherent meaning before, because all of these could be interpreted
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: one hundred different ways in terms of what the situation is,
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: and all of them could be equally simple to one another,
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: so that we just don't know, you know, what what
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: the narrative is supposed to be, Like we have the
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: the what they believe that the narrative is. But I
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: could just as easily, as I said, point out that
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: what's actually happening here is that the one that's opening
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: the box is doing something that's not supposed to be doing,
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: and the other one that's slamming the box shut is
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: doing what it's supposed to be doing. And I think
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: that's in the box is supposed to be in there,
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: or you know, any any way you want to try
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: and spin this, they all they're all plausibly accurate and
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: all equally simple. So anyway, just to wrap up this
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: study they had, they had those alternating trials where you
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: had one that was opening it and one that was
• 40:31
  Speaker 1: closing it. They had another study in which the puppet
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: would play with the ball, and what it would do
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: is it would roll the ball to another puppet, and
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: then the other puppet would roll it back. But then
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: there was a third puppet where if the if the
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: first one rolled it to the other puppet, it would
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: run away with it. And again this isn't necessarily that
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: any inherent morality going on. You know, the maybe the
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: second one was getting like they were playing keep away
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: from it with its own what they were taking its
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: lunch money sort of so to speak, and that third
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: one got its lunch money back and ran off with it,
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: like to go be safe somewhere. There's just there's so
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: many ways to spin it. And so in both of
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: those study, the five month olds, they preferred the good guy,
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: which is to say they looked at it longer, the
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: one that helped open the boxes and the one who
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: rolled the ball back. So that guy, the research des
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: decided was good, although we don't know what the babies
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: thought about that, and that the babies tend to look
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: at that one longer, so they inferred from that that
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: there was inherent morality, and that this suggests that all
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: the babies that they studied had a general appreciation of
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: good and bad behavior, one that spans a range of
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: different types of actions. But they don't want to get
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: too focused on just the good guy. They also want
• 41:33
  Speaker 1: to get focused on.
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: Justice, and we love justice, all right.
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: So in a later study, Hamlin, Win and Bloom teamed
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: up with a psychology graduate student at Yale Naha Mah John.
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: They wanted to determine if babies possessed more subtle moral capacities,
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: and they wondered if good acts would meet a positive
• 41:52
  Speaker 2: response and if bad behaviors would meet a negative response.
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: So they exposed twenty one month year olds to a
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: good guy or bad guy situation. So, first of all,
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: if the question here that we're talking about is whether
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: babies are evil, a twenty one month year old is
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: not a baby, So that's that's not I don't know
• 42:12
  Speaker 2: if that fits the operational definition of babies.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: It's approaching toddlerhood, not quite, it's approaching toddler that's two
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: years old. Yeah's almost too. They've definitely been around a
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: lot of language and scenarios, and probably at this point
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: the iPad or the TV has become a babysitter for
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: at least part of its life, So they've already seen
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: depictions of a lot of this stuff coming into this
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: even though a lot of them are aren't gonna have
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: very much language developed, yet there will be some right.
• 42:38
  Speaker 5: And at the very least, they themselves have demonstrated behavior
• 42:42
  Speaker 5: that has been defined for them by caregivers as good
• 42:45
  Speaker 5: or bad. Yes, great many times because they're twenty one
• 42:49
  Speaker 5: month olds and they do a.
• 42:51
  Speaker 4: Lot of that, right.
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: So, so they gave the babies the opportunity with the babies,
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: I'm so sorry, I can't keep calling them babies. They
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: gave the toddlers the opportunity to reward the good guy
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: with a treat and punish the bad guy by removing
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: the treat. The authors found when asked to give a treat,
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: they gave a treat to the good guy, and when
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: asked to take away, they took from the bad guy.
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, all right. So obviously the world's lemma of
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: situation can be more elaborate than the choice of just
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: between good and bad. So any given situation, would you
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: prefer someone who rewards good and punishes bad to someone
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: who punishes good and rewarded bad, and other combinations and
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: possible spins on that. So to see if babies could
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: do this too, they tested good and bad situations with
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: eight month olds and again using puppets They first showed
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: a puppet who acted as a helper. They were helping
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: another puppet open a box. You can interpret that any
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: way you want. I'm gonna interpret it as like Ocean's eleven,
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: where they're actually performing a heist. They presented us a
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: scene where the puppet was the target of a good
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: action by one puppet and the bad action of another puppet.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: So one was just sort of passively having things happened
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: to it, and the baby's had to choose between a
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: puppet who rewarded a good guy versus the puppet who
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: punished a bad guy. They showed next the Baby's a
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: situation where the puppy but character acted as the hinderer,
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: so the puppet was keeping another puppet from opening a box.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: Might be a good reason for that, but there it is.
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: In this situation, they chose again between a puppet who
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: rewarded the bad guy versus one who punished the bad guy.
• 44:14
  Speaker 5: So the results here were that when the target of
• 44:16
  Speaker 5: the action was itself a good guy, babies preferred the
• 44:20
  Speaker 5: puppet who was nice to it. And this isn't surprising
• 44:23
  Speaker 5: given the results of the earlier studies where babies kind
• 44:25
  Speaker 5: of preferred those who acted quote unquote nicely if you
• 44:29
  Speaker 5: want to conceptualize what they were how they were responding
• 44:32
  Speaker 5: as nice. So the interesting result was that what happened
• 44:36
  Speaker 5: when they watched the bad guy being rewarded or punished
• 44:39
  Speaker 5: here they actually chose the punisher. So despite their overall
• 44:42
  Speaker 5: preference for good actors, as the study is defining them
• 44:46
  Speaker 5: over bad, then babies were drawn to the bad actors
• 44:50
  Speaker 5: when those actors were punishing bad behavior.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: So babies are sadists.
• 44:56
  Speaker 6: They want justice.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: They're vindictive sadists. That's what I'm here. So does this
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: tell us anything about morality with respect to adults? What
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: do you think?
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, the way it's sounding is that babies are
• 45:11
  Speaker 2: just just blank adult templates already, Like we're just they
• 45:14
  Speaker 2: just they already have their their sense of moral compass.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: So they're just we're just giving them a little bit
• 45:20
  Speaker 2: of direction, but not much because they can already kind
• 45:22
  Speaker 2: of do it right.
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: Right. So, author Denesh Desuzo wrote in his book What's
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: So Great about Christianity? And he uses evolution as his
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: sort of jumping off point, and he says that nice
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: and kind behaviors have a clear genetic advantage, and I
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: think to a point, there is something to say that
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: cooperation has a genetic advantage, it has a survival advantage.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: Just put it that way. I think it fits nicely
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: inside of evolutionary science to speak to when when organisms,
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: specifically in this case, humans work together, they have more resources,
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: they have greater protection from threats, they have a higher
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: reproduction and survival rate. So there is a survival reason
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: for those things to develop instead of the context of
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: that situation. But then he goes and argue there is
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: no Jarwinnian rationale for why, for example, you would give
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: up your seat to an old lady on a bus
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: or let someone else who's in a hurted grocery store.
• 46:14
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to go on this list of nonsense.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: So there are reasons. He's basically saying that there is
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: no reason that people would be kinds to each other
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: in certain situations that are not based on survival. Right,
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: and he gives the example of giving up your seat
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: to someone on the bus, and so instead reason that
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: those behaviors are not best explained by evolution or psychology,
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: but by the voice of God within our souls. That's
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: the best explanation that he could come up with I
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: can't even say it with a straight face. I mean,
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: we understand how certain behaviors and patterns emerge in that
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: those are easily easily explained by how we understand those,
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: how we understand the process of behavior and what goes
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: on there. Right Like we understand that there are certain
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: cultural values that are things that are promoted that even
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: when you are not explicitly rewarded for doing something like
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: giving up your seat to someone on the bus, that
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: that's something we're going to do anyway, because those fit
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: inside of our cultures and our values like you have to.
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: It's basically arguing that there's a mystical force out there
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: that overrides all of our learning experiences and our genes
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: and that those things are not important. It can't possibly
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: account for this, and instead it has to be this
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: magical voice of God within our souls. That is the explanation.
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: And I'm not even making a comment on whether or
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: not there is a god or there's any or that
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: that God has any kind of influence over those types
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: of behaviors. That's just not a scientific that's just not
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: a reasonable way of answering that question. Regardless of a
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: being scientific or not. This just doesn't make sense, Like
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: we can't just say, well, your culture doesn't matter, and
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: your history doesn't matter, and what you've learned doesn't matter,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: and everything you know about norms and politeness and all
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: that stuff that you've gotten from wherever you've been raised,
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: that's irrelevant. We all know that our soul knows what
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: a bus is, and the voice on our soul knows
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: that what we're supposed to do on a bus, and
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: so those things that we've learned to point irrelevant, because
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: that's got to be the most likely factor that just
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: that doesn't make any sense, regardless of where your faith
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: is at.
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I ultimately it doesn't add new knowledge to the
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: natural world around us, and it doesn't really give us
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: a way of organizing our understanding.
• 48:15
  Speaker 4: About the world around us.
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: Yes, all said, it's a pretty nebulous like explanation for
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: what's going on, and it doesn't really add to the
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: current body of knowledge that we that we have at
• 48:27
  Speaker 2: our fingertips. So I think that's I think that's kind
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: of where we're coming at more than anything else. Is Like,
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: spirituality is great in whatever it is that you practice,
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: but it doesn't really explain what is.
• 48:35
  Speaker 4: Going on here when we talk about morality of babies.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: Cool. I agree. I think that was really well said.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: I'm out of clever ways to segue to ads, so
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: here they are. All right, let's get back to whatever
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: it is we were saying. So there's also some larger discussion.
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: As I said, we're going to tackle morality on its
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: own at some point. But they have shown, especially with babies,
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: that there, they say, are moral biased toward our own kind.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: So there's sort of an US versus them built into
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: these babies in a way. And studies conducted with babies
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: even up to three months old, show a preference for
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: faces of the race that is most familiar to them. Okay,
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: so what they're basically looking at is how long they
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: gaze at this, and they probably point out most familiar
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: to them. So really it is just they tend to
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: get used to the things that they're around the most.
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: That's that's essentially what we're saying. That's the best description
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: of what's happening. And like, okay, cool, Like yep, I
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: think yep, I mean, what are we going to add
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: to that? Yes, that is that is what happens, like
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: almost by definition. Congratulations, I guess. And then in another
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: study that was conducted with eleven month old showed that
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: they demonstrated preference, again usually gazing toward uh, those who
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: speak the same language versus a foreign language. So this
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: is the exact same thing whatever they tend to be
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: around the most. If they had been raised around twelve
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: different languages, then probably all of those things they're going
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: to respond to around about the same way. And then
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: especially if they're all spoken to it relatively equally, and
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: then will be relatively confronted by language they don't know.
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: I mean, what is the I don't know. I just
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: I guess. What I'm saying is, I don't understand why
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: there's anything unique about that that is not something that
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: we we would have predicted or known already, or that
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: we have to try and impose some kind of inherent
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: bias that is built into their their their soul or
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: their genetics based on that, right, you know, you know
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: what I'm saying.
• 50:40
  Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't, it does. I don't see.
• 50:43
  Speaker 2: I don't see uh, I don't see a utility and
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: understanding that because I think that it's just kind of like, uh,
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: it's that idea of common sense, right, Like it just
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: kind of makes sense that if you especially if you
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: know about learning history, it does, if you know about
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: like what that individual has been exposed to for their
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: entire life, then why that that it's perfectly in line
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: with that.
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: Well, and it's you're right, and it's not even that,
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: it's it's necessarily like common sense and not something we
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: but don't that we don't know. But it's sort of
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: taking something like I'm gonna hold up this circle. I'm
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: gonna say like research has found the circle is round,
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: and I'm like, that's the definition of a circle. Like
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: the research is shown that people are unfamiliar with things
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: are unfamiliar with. I'm like, whoa, that's the definition of
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: being unfamiliar with something. It doesn't even common sense?
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: Snarkiest I've ever seen, Abraham people, this is great.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: Like, how much time did it take you to figure
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: out that people are unfamiliar with things unfamiliar with that
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: that keep you up at night for a while. I've
• 51:50
  Speaker 1: had an awesome next birthday present for you. It's a box,
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: and I'm gonna surprise you by telling you it's box
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: like in nature. All right, to move on?
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: Based on these experiments, and within his research, Bloom states
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: that babies probably have no conscious access to moral actions,
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: no idea why certain situations or acts are good or
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: bad either. So he'll kind of state that they respond
• 52:14
  Speaker 2: on a on a gut level, which I don't know
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: that I that I buy that, right, No, same.
• 52:22
  Speaker 5: I guess I guess what that What that might potentially
• 52:24
  Speaker 5: mean is that these babies respond in a way that
• 52:29
  Speaker 5: you would expect them to, and they respond quickly given
• 52:33
  Speaker 5: what they've been exposed to. Perhaps if you want to,
• 52:36
  Speaker 5: if you want to find gut level in some way
• 52:40
  Speaker 5: that's maybe a little bit more uh, pragmatic and based
• 52:44
  Speaker 5: on you know, what we know about learning history.
• 52:47
  Speaker 6: So I don't want to put words in his mouth.
• 52:48
  Speaker 5: But.
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: Maybe giving him a little more credit than he deserves.
• 52:52
  Speaker 5: Maybe, But I but without having the precise definition of
• 52:58
  Speaker 5: responding from your gut for a for a baby, right,
• 53:02
  Speaker 5: that's yeah, Now I'm inferring what he's infering them.
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: No, No, it's just a big it's easy to get
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: into that habit. I think that baby's burping is responding
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: at a gut level. That's what That's what that means
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: to me.
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: Parsimonium, My friend Parson if you and he also kind
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: of uh, he kind of goes into this idea that
• 53:23
  Speaker 2: if you observe older babies in some of these situations
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: or experiments, you can see them smile, clap their hands,
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: shake their heads frowned during these good and bad situations.
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: They're not activing impassively.
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: So his argument is that they are actively engaging in
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: these these acts.
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: So essentially, he points out that their experiences may be
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: cognitively empty but emotionally intense, which is how I would
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: describe politics these days. Anyway, hot takes takes.
• 53:54
  Speaker 4: All right, And it's similar to us as adults.
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: We often find, uh, we often we often have instinctive
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: feelings or thought that's when presented with a moral dilemma.
• 54:01
  Speaker 2: So I think that's kind of what he's liking it
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: towards likening it towards do we go?
• 54:06
  Speaker 4: So maybe that's kind of way's going.
• 54:07
  Speaker 5: Now, I mean that's maybe, I don't know, that's a
• 54:11
  Speaker 5: pretty big claim to make.
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, I mean, I don't we don't we
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: have to unpack what does instinctive mean in this particular case.
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: And that's something I've been thinking about and wanted to
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: tackle for a while and do an episode on is
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: what we mean by instincts and what we mean by
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: human nature? And it'll be a lot of fun because
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: I think that there's when we don't know we just
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: say it's human nature. Like some if somebody does something
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: and they do so in such a way that they
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: seem like they were, I don't know, very likely to
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: do that thing, then they, rather than do any kind
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: of investigation, the answer is just, oh, that's just human nature.
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: I was on a show actually before we do that episode,
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: I'm going to spend the next however long it takes
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: before we get to recording that I'm going to try
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: and write down instances when I hear people say it's
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: just human nature. On TV shows are just around other
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: people because it happens so so so much. And it
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: was something where it was like a crime show or something,
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: and they're like, you know, people are going to notice
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: someone who's just standing on the streets. It's human nature.
• 55:17
  Speaker 1: I'm like, is it is that human nature? Like we
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: evolved to specifically attend to strangers on our street. Let's
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: go back one hundred thousand years and some of the
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: earliest branches of evolutionary past what we were developing at
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: that point was the nature too, so but that what
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: the the raises inside of the question is what nature is,
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: what instinct what instincts are, and then what we can
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: know about those things, and how we can attribute our
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: actions to those instincts it.
• 55:47
  Speaker 5: And then kind of Bloom's final thought on all of this,
• 55:50
  Speaker 5: he states, quote, our capacities as babies are sharply limited.
• 55:54
  Speaker 5: It is the insights of rational individuals that make a
• 55:56
  Speaker 5: truly universal and unselfish morality something our species can aspire to.
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, let's go and wrap it up. I
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: mean no, I think it's we've attacked that plenty of
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: times already. So as you walk away from this episode,
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: I think the important things that maybe keep in mind
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: are that how are we to know if we have
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: some inherent capacity for good and evil? And understanding the
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: difference between those two things, and asking a baby at
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: a certain level of age is a way in which
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: people have gone about doing that, but the way that
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: they ask it and measure it are very ambiguous situations
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: based on very ambiguous responses from the babies, and essentially
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: just layering on top of that our interpretation of what
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: we think that might mean, and that to me tells
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: me that we we have as much of an idea
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: about the inherent morality of babies as we did before
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: we did any of that research, because of how many
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: assumptions had to be made in order to conduct it
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: in the first place. And I will say, I think
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: there have been some interesting questions raised by this. When
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: they actually put in some controls, I think we had
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: some more to work with and talk about and maybe
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: trying discern. When they switched the shapes and the colors,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: when they blinded the not physically blinded, but when they
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: made it so that the research assistants didn't know which
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: ones they were doing, when they introduced different characters, all
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: of those things helped bring a level of control to
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: it that made that made us sort of think, look
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: at this and think maybe there's something to investigate down
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: the road that maybe is the jumping off point. But
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: a lot of these things they were they were so
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: ambiguous that we have we have nothing to attend to
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: to tell us that we know anything more about it
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: now than we did when we before we started. You
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: know what I mean?
• 57:45
  Speaker 6: I agree, And I think you know we discussed earlier too.
• 57:47
  Speaker 5: You know, it's it's really trying to do still these
• 57:51
  Speaker 5: really complex concepts that even us, as adult human beings
• 57:57
  Speaker 5: with fairly advanced cognition, struggle with right morality ethics, you know,
• 58:02
  Speaker 5: and how the interplay of those things actually manifest themselves,
• 58:06
  Speaker 5: and how we behave Not that there's anything wrong with
• 58:10
  Speaker 5: obviously trying to apply experimental rigor to human behavior and
• 58:15
  Speaker 5: deriving things from from what we observe, but trying to
• 58:20
  Speaker 5: do that in this particular arrangement where the rigor really
• 58:23
  Speaker 5: wasn't there, where so much was inferred by the experimental
• 58:27
  Speaker 5: presentation and layered on by the researchers themselves, it's really
• 58:31
  Speaker 5: hard to extrapolate anything of benefit on those concepts that
• 58:36
  Speaker 5: philosophers have been discussing for thousands of years.
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: You know, Yeah, I guess I'm probably for me, I
• 58:43
  Speaker 3: probably walk away from this episode and kind of a
• 58:46
  Speaker 3: lot of this research with the question of like, I
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: still don't really understand if babies are evil.
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: That's still a question of mine, you know.
• 58:53
  Speaker 2: I just and more seriously, I just don't know that
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: this really gives us anything to build on. I don't
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, I still I still have
• 59:04
  Speaker 2: a hard time seeing it outside of like more a
• 59:07
  Speaker 2: more natural science type of you know, lens, I don't
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: really see it. I see it more as like child
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: development and growth, but not really like an issue of
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: morality with babies.
• 59:17
  Speaker 4: I definitely see it more as just this this.
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: Idea that uh you know, I think I think more
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: importantly when we did, when we dig into this episode,
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: when we talk about that idea of culture and cultural selection,
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: and I think that is kind of the key to it,
• 59:29
  Speaker 2: is really that language and that cultural piece, because that's
• 59:32
  Speaker 2: what shapes it up over a long period of time,
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: like a baby's not walking out going like oh, I
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: really support the death penalty, you know, I think it's
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: I think that that's you know, it comes down to
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: that that that language piece, that that that cultural piece,
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: that that environmental piece, more than anything else.
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: That was our episode on uh on do Babies Recognize
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: good and evil? And we had some skepticism them toward
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: the end. In particular, there was a note to the
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: fact that like, how would you even know? There was
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: a point of contention that we definitely brought to this.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: But there has been some follow up research here, and
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: so we'll dig into that first and then we'll sort
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: of close out with some additional opinions.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 2: Right, So, one of the important considerations around the topic
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: hand here is whether or not we actually believe that
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: babies inherently recognize good or evil. It doesn't mean that
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 2: we are making judgments about humans broadly and baby specifically
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: on the issue of morality. We're just kind of looking
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: at can they recognize things that we have, you know,
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 2: these are good things or bad things? Can they even
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: recognize that? To begin with?
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you might hear our skepticism and interpret
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: that to mean that we're saying I don't believe that
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: humans are good, or I don't believe that humans are evil,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: or I don't believe that humans are good or evil.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: And all I'm trying to say is I don't believe
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: we have done a good job of finding that out
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: right now, particular in assuming that we can learn about
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: this from babies, specifically in the way that they attempted
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: to learn about this. I think bringing to this and
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: just as I don't know this feels tangential, but this
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: is I promise it's related. Cooperation is a behavioral trait
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: that has been repeatedly selected in humans for tens or
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, right, So was aggression, Like,
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: we humans have the capacity for this. We have seen it.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: We have been destructive, we have been cruel. We've also
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: been kind and helpful and altruistic and cooperative, Like we've
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: done those things. So what makes anything good or evil? Though,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: is not something that you can just say can be
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: assigned to a particular behavior, Like I think generally we
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 1: would say the things that we have that have selected
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: that have allowed us to thrive as a species mostly
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: fall into the category of good. And I think that
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: depends or that cooperation like things fit into that context.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: But that depends on what your goals are, right, Like,
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: the important thing here is the cultural values of the
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: person doing the judging determines whether or not we even
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: call something good or evil, right, Like, what does that
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: person bring to the picture here, because that looks very
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: different even today, you pull any two people, you're gonna
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: get different ideas about what would be considered good and evil,
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: so or just good and bad even broadly speaking there,
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: So I think just saying that, like, we definitely have
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: demonstrated cooperation, we've demonstrated cruelty, and when we look at
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: the behavior of infants, and we try and interpret something
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: about what that means for them as a member of
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: our species. I think we are forgetting that our own
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: judgment about what counts as good and bad has been
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: superimposed on what that baby's actually.
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 2: Doing right right, absolutely now. In the studies, too, like
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 2: the quote unquote studies, babies would sometimes gaze longer at
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 2: puppets who were supposed to be helpers, and that was
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 2: presumed by the researchers to reflect the preference for goodness,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 2: which is a huge philosophical leap and a huge assumption.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 2: It would be equally logical, in our opinion to assume
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 2: that the east facing flowers of my butting tomato plant
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 2: it means that it wishes to be growing in China
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: or somewhere further east. Right. So it's just it's one
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: of those things where it's just it's such a huge
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 2: leap in logic in like understanding that we can't make
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 2: that conclusion.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So again, thinking about this culturally, a particular culture
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: may not view the behavior of the puppets as arranged
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: in these experiments as being helpful, or that being helpful
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: as being good. So, for example, Republicans might find the
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: idea of helping as woke or dei or generally evil,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: and would instead view like selfishness and aggression as good
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: as we've seen in sort of how they've portrayed and
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: carried out their acts of values.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, consistently, consistently right now.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: A twenty eighteen study by Dahl and Killen in Frontiers
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: and Psychology argue that one issue with these studies is
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: that they don't clearly define their terms of morality. They
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 2: cite some studies that indicate that while infants and toddlers
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 2: display behaviors resembling moral actions such as helping, they do
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: not make moral judgments until later. And the article emphasizes
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: studying these developmental changes, particularly how children's understanding and moral
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 2: issues evolves from simple actions to complex judgments and languaging
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 2: and about fairness, justice, and intergroup relations. So they're engaging
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: these behaviors, but it's not quite the same as making
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: judgments or making or engaging in recognition.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: And so this wasn't necessarily a study, right, They were
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: just sort of discussing some of what they saw as
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: some conceptual things to be considered when talking about this
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: issue of morality as it relates to trying to understand
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 1: and interpret the behaviors of these very very young children here,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: these infants, And essentially what they what they said here
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: is that like, children will do things that look they'll
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: like hand you stuff, they'll share things, they'll try and
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: like be physically close to you in a way that's
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: really cute and endearing. But we don't see them doing
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: anything that looks like moral judgments until they've developed more
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: and they've got some more language and stuff like that.
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: Then it starts to be like this is a good thing,
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: this is a bad thing type of thing about those
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: So there was a twenty twenty one qualitative study by
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: Hannah Siva I'm going to try and I guess that
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: is And this was in Slovakia and the journal was Religions,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: and they looked at children's associations with good and evil
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: during the COVID nineteen lockdowns. And essentially what they were
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: trying to see is what sort of changed. And the
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: study observed a shift from viewing good and evil in
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: religious or supernatural contexts to more personal, immediate social contexts,
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: and the children's understanding of these concepts became more grounded
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: in everyday life and relationships than in religious teachings. So
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: it's like, evil aren't necessarily the God and devil. They're
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: not spirits, they're not like angels, they're not the things.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: Good and evil has to do with how people treat
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: each other, right, And so essentially what I sort of
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: interpreted from their findings here was that with less religious education,
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: people began to few good and evil in terms of
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: how people treated one another, rather than interpreting it as
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: like blessings and punishments from God. And so they didn't
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: say this in the study, but to me that like
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: suggested that they were directing their morality toward how you'd
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: evaluate your treatment toward other people, meaning that treating people
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: well was more moral, and people treating you well was moral,
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: and treating people poorly was immoral or evil, if you will, right,
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: rather than it just being sort of assigning those qualities
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: to deific figures, if you will, right.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: So, speaking of punishments from God, here's an ad. Now
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 2: that we've remediated our behavior and we have moved beyond
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 2: our punishment.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: Repent, we have repented.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 2: Let's talk about a twenty twenty three article. So very
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 2: recent So twenty twenty three article and the Big Think
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 2: delves into the perplexing moral question of whether people are
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 2: inherently good or evil, sparked by the case of Lucy Leppie,
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: a UK nurse convicted of murdering seven babies despite her
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: seemingly normal upbringing. The core of the debate centers on
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 2: whether evil behaviors are a product of one's environment, nature,
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: or inherent traits nurture, the long lasting argument of nature
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: versus nurture. So fun.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and even I mean that was actually one of
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: the important points in the twenty eighteen dollar in killin
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: kill in study Killing Anyway, was that there is this
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 1: talk in these in some of these spaces around this
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: being is a nature or a nurture and they sort
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: of say that everything that we do is genetic and environmental,
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: and of course they are completely correct about that, and
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: they call this the constructivist approach. So yes, I agree
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: with all that. That is exactly how we would talk
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: about that. That does make perfect sense and is essentially
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: empirically demonstrable. So anyway, we're talking about this Big Think article,
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: and historically thinkers like Confucian scholar Menzi argue that humans
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: are born with innate virtues that can flourish in a
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: nurturing environment. They're born good, the environment makes them gooder.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: This view suggests that people are inherently good but can
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: be corrupted by their surroundings. And interestingly, contrarily, Christian theology
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: often instead embraces the concept of original sin, suggesting that
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: humans are born with a propensity to do wrong. We're
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: born guilty and that must be managed with moral guidance
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: and societal structure. Essentially is the idea there. And so
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 1: there's sort of the two different views of Confucianism that
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 1: suggests that people are born with goodness and Christianity, which
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: is the assumption that people are born with evilness.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 2: Right, So the article also references the Marquis de Sade
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 2: and Sigmund Freud, who explored the allure of evil and
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 2: the internal conflict between our base desires and moral constraints.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 2: Kind of the overarching internal and external battles that we face.
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, just just as a thing to know about it.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: The case of let Be challenges the simplistic dichotomy of
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: nature versus nurture, as we mentioned, by presenting a situation
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: in which an individual with no apparent traumatic background, no
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: reason we can directly point to, and yet they commit
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: these horrible, heinous acts. And this raises complex questions about
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: the origins of evil, whether certain individuals or simply anomalies
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: who divie convention and moral explanations. But the debate remains open,
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: with the article leaning toward a belief in inherent human goodness,
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: but acknowledging the sort of unsettling exceptions that cases like
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: this one present, where it just feels like people want
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: more answers and answers are not forthcoming right now.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: Perhaps the most to give you article wasn't a twenty
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: twenty four article by Luca and colleagues in development that
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: directly followed and attempted to replicate the original study. They
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: first reported on the follow up studies that have been
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 2: unable to replicate the results of the original study, including
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 2: a twenty twenty study that found exactly fifty to fifty
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 2: splits of preferences for the helpers over the hinderers. So
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: they went back and they looked at all the studies
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 2: that were done since then, and then they came up
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 2: with their own attempt to replicate the study.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that fifty to fifty split was that was
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: like another article that had happened they cited, but Luca
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: and colleagues preregistered their study. So preregistering, we're not going
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: to go in depth in what that means, but essentially
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: it's it's committing to these are our methods for conducting
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: the study and how we're going to do the analysis,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: so that you can't change that later in a way
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: that would then favor data to fit a particular hypothesis. Right,
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: So by pre registering, you're committing to whatever the outcome
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: is is the outcome, whether or not it confirms anything,
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: and so there's definitely some merit to that anyway. Their
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: study and then they also did a very large international
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: collaborative effort with thirty seven other research labs across five continents,
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: and doing this allows them to try and eliminate bias
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: and increase the validity of their data by replicating it
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: in different locations with different people from different cultures, all
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: sort of trying to understand the same phenomenon. And what
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: they found was that in forty nine point three four
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: percent of the children, they preferred the helpers over the hinderers. So,
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: again going back to that original study, we talked about
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: in the main episode were they did the puppet show,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: and they basically tried to have They assumed that children
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: looking at these puppets indicated preference for and that meant
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: that if they looked at the helpers more than that
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: they were inherently good. But their option was look at
• 1:11:49
  Speaker 1: the helpers, or look at the hinderers, or look at
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: the helpers, or don't look at the helpers at the
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: very least. And if they looked at the helpers, then
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: they were seeing that as a sign of preference. And
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: so fifty percent of the time means none of the time, right, right,
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 1: because if they only looked at the hinderers, that would
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: be saying something. If they only looked at the helpers,
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: that would be saying something. But exactly fifty to fifty
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 1: is like it is. It literally is chance. It just
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: they had to look somewhere you're going to score at
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: what your score is A, or score it as B
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: wherever they were looking, and it just happened to be
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 1: split about fifty to fifty. And they also found that
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: fifty five point eighty five preferred. This is a quote here,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: direct quote fifty five point eighty five preferred characters who
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: pushed up versus down an inanimate object in the non
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: social condition, neither proportion differed from chance or from each other.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: The study provides evidence against infants pro social preferences in
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: the hill paradigm, suggesting that the effect size is weaker,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: absent in, or develops later than previously estimated. End quote.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: So essentially what they found here is that like, there's
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: no difference, Like they there is no clear pattern of
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: preference or anything that's showing up here. As a matter
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: of fact, if it was skewed any particular way, it
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: was slightly in favor of the hinderers, right, But whether
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: you interpret that as being preference for or something else, again,
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: is superimposing your own sort of ideas, values, and understandings
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: on that situation.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. Now, as in the original argument we made, there
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 2: are so many problems with these studies that are specifically
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 2: trying to investigate whether infants recognize good and evil that
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: it's hard to know where to begin. So one of
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 2: the questions that comes up often is what is good
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: and what is evil? They don't clearly define this, and
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 2: it's kind of impossible to do. Across the board. You
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: can probably describe specific instances, but culturally that's going to
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 2: vary or change. Also, contemporary judgment is going to apply
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 2: on whatever we look at as evil or good in
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: that given moment, compared to what might have been true
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: one hundred years ago or even fifty years ago.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: And as we raised as a concern in the original discussion,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: how would you measure an infant's preference for something such
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: as a puppet? How would you know? How would you
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: determine that that preference that you measured in whatever way
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: you measured it meant a judgment about the relative goodness
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: of that thing With any degree of confidence. They went
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: with I gaze duration as a measure of preference, and
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: following the infants observing to whatever extent they were observing,
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: an ambiguous Pappa show like, is the infant at all?
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: Like to me? If I were to present this to
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: my cats and see which one they looked at more
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: and then try and draw conclusions about their relative morality
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: with respect to it, I was like, Babe, they just
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: they don't have any language, they don't have any experience.
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: Their vision kind of sucks at that age, Like, as
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: far as they can tell, there's just shapes happening in
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: front of them, right, right, Like, I don't think there's
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: any reason for us to try and superimpose beyond that
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: what values there may be. And even when they do
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: and they like try and do these studies, the studies
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: are basically like, yeah, it's fifty to fifty. It could
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 1: go either way. Like there's no there's no clear delineation,
• 1:15:05
  Speaker 1: there's no clear data or movement that would help us
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: interpret this in a way that is in any way meaningful.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 2: I guess maybe this is these are really good studies
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 2: to show interest and keeping in mind that like babies
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 2: are effectively that they're seeing puppets for the first time
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: in their lives. Yeah, they're seeing these things that are
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 2: like they're they're curious. Like if you look at babies,
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 2: babies tend to be pretty decent observers of things in
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 2: their world because they're like, what is all of this?
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: So, so I don't yeah, like to get to to
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 2: get to the leap of brand new baby is seeing
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: the world for the first time, to brand new baby
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 2: can tell me that something is good or evil just
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 2: feels weird, like it doesn't it doesn't even like it
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 2: doesn't make any sense. On any level, it's such a
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 2: leap well.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: And I think broadly understanding that, like any and all
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: cultural behavior we do, is in fact it has to
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: be learned. It has to be you. You cannot genetically
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: program can temporary culture, You just can't. So given understanding that,
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: that means that culture consists of social interactions, which means
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: we grow up in those social interactions and we start
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: to understand and interpret what those things mean in that
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: given context. So to me, implies like that very fact,
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: it basically makes it impossible to assume that a baby
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: who is not yet really embedded in a culture can
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: understand that there is even a social interaction taking place,
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 1: let alone what it's supposed to mean. Like they see movements,
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: they see things doing stuff. Does that depict some nature
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: of the relationship between those things? I don't think so.
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: I mean I feel like when we work even with
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: children sometimes who have like intellectual disabilities, like being able
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: to draw an abstract conclusion, like who have language. These
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: are kids often who have some amount of language, who
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: would struggle to draw abstract conclusions about the nature of
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 1: the relationships between puppets and a simulated social interaction like that,
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: and we're assuming that babies who like whose brains are
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: just mush who are just trying to like take in
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: censoring for information at all, would have something important to
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: evaluate about understanding and the nature of those those relationships
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: that are depicted in this weird, ambiguous puppet show of
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: a social interaction. Like it's just a completely asinine premise
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: in my mind to think that we could even do
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: anything meaningful with that, right, and like the research shows that,
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: Like the research has clearly showed now time and time again,
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: Like there have been multiple studies that have failed to
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: replicate this effect. This is, at the very best, this
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 1: is not a way for us to understand this phenomenon.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: And at worst, I think it's like a waste of time,
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: Like this is people who they're actually like misleading time
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: and energy spent on this to a phenomenon that we
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: we can't learn anything about, or at least we haven't
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: figured out how to learn anything about in a meaningful way,
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: right exactly, All Right, Well, I feel like that's enough
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: damage done to them. Maybe I don't know, have we
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: done that.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 2: I mean, let's revisit. Let's revisit in five years and
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: see if there's any changes. I doubt there will be.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like the probably in five years, my
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: prediction would be that the research has continued to what
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: research does continue to happen has showed that again, there's
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: just no real effective to dig out of this right
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: now when you're doing it scientifically at least. I mean,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you could mock up a crappy study that
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: finds exactly what you wanted to find, because that's not
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: hard to do, right exactly. All right, Well, we're kind
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: of running long given that, Like we just ran a
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: full length episode and then ran essentially a almost two
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: minis worth of content afterward. But I think we can
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: wrap it up there. If you would like to reach
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: out to us and tell us about your experiences with
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: puppet shows and babies or good and evil or whatnot,
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: then we are happy to hear from you. We appreciate
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: heaping mounts of praise as well as constructive criticism. You
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: can reach us directly by emailing us at info at
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: wwdwwdpodcast dot com. You can also reach us on the
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: various social media platforms. I'm particularly over at Blue Sky.
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: Right now, that's what I have to say about that.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: But if you would like to support the show, then
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: you can become a member of the club. Head over
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: to Patreon, where you will get behind the scenes content
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: at free content, early episodes, a bunch of goodies like that,
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: and maybe the most the thing you want the most
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: is that I'll read your name. Maybe not, but I'm
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 1: gonna do it. So thank you so much to Mike,
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: m Megan, Mike T, Justin, Kim Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, Brian, Ashley,
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: and Kiera for all of your amazing, generous, wonderful support
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: for as long as you've been doing that.
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, yes, y'all are the best forever, And.
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: Of course thank you all for listening. Thank you Shane
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: for recording with me today, and matter of fact, thank
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: my whole team running in fact checking from Shane and myself.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: Our social media coordinator is Alma Wilson. And the person
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: who had to stitch together not one, but two episodes
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: and did so with professional grace and with a deft
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: hand is Justin.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: Yes. And also thank you to Miranda for recording with
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 2: us originally because that was such a great time.
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: Huge shoutout Tomrita, who's also got one of a baby
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: of her own who I think is out there determining
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: good from evil.
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 2: Maybe I don't know, Yeah, oh yeah, most definitely based
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 2: on the studies.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: At least, we got to recommend some things, but we've
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: also got to add some things or subtract some things.
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: Here's ads. As I said, if you're joining us for
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: the first time, we like to recommend some things that
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: are just usually unrelated to our topic at hands. They're
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: just things for fun. And we don't get paid for this,
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: so though it would be nice if we did, but
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: let's go ahead and do it. A little.
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 4: Recommendations.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 2: I'm going to recommend a conference. And the reason I
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: recommend this conference is because for behavior analysts there are
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 2: not a lot of resources on this particular topic, and
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 2: so I thought it would be good to share. This
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 2: conference is called sex ABBA. It is all about sexual
• 1:21:00
  Speaker 2: behavior and behavior analysis. A lot of incredible diverse speakers,
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 2: something that would absolutely I mean, even if you're not
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 2: sold on going to a sex ABA conference, I just
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: know that it would for sure upset Rohnda santis So
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 2: and that should be enough to get you in. But
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: they just held the conference at the end of January
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 2: beginning of February and so the recordings for the events
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 2: are live through the end of March, so by the
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 2: time you hear this, you should be able to access
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 2: it and attend those trainings asynchronously. There's some really great
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 2: stuff out there, and I think it's just really a powerful,
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 2: amazing conference full of really intelligent and incredible and powerful people.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: So I think you all should take a look at it.
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: That's great, awesome, Yeah, cool, Yeah, if that's a thing
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: you're interested, to check out the sex ABBA Conference.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, all right.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: I am recommending a board game, as I do sometimes.
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: This is a relatively newish game. It is from the
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: publisher stone Meyer Games. It is for people who are philatalists.
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: Just kidding, but that is. The people who collect stamps
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: are called philatelists. Apparently it looks like it should be philtalists,
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: but that's what the pronunciation guy told me. Philatalists anyway,
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: So it's a lot more fun than it sounds like.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: I'm selling it by describing what this hobby is. This
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: is a really interesting game. And the other thing about
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: it too, is it's really fast. You can probably your
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: first time out if you're also trying to like have
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: conversations and not really focus on the game. You can
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: probably play this in under an hour and a half,
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: possibly around an hour, and if you know what you're doing,
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: you could probably play this in thirty to forty five
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: minutes no problem. It's a quick game. It goes three rounds,
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: and it has a really unique mechanism in it. It's
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: called I Split you Choose, So essentially you each take
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: turns grabbing some stamps from like a center pool, and
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: then you split them into two groups, and then you
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: put them out for people to choose, and someone will
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: take one of your groups and you get to keep
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: the other one. So you sort of are if you
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: make one of those groups way too good, then they're
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: definitely going to take that group and you won't get
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: the stamps that you wanted. So you've kind of got
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: to balance how you set up those groups so that
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: people will get the ones that you want, and then
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: you get to take from someone else. You could take
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: one of their groups, and then you just are sort
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: of arranging them in this little grid pattern to try
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: and score points. And it's pretty straightforward game. Honestly. It's
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: pretty quick to teach, As I said, pretty quick to play,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: has a lot of really good opportunities for variability because
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: there's tons and tons of different stamps, and tons and
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: tons of different ways that you might score. You like,
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: draw these five cards that are different scoring criteria, so
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: each game you'll have a different sort of combination of those.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: But yeah, stamp swap from Stone Myer Games.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 2: That sounds fun.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really cool and it's a pretty game. I
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: think it's one of those where it's like people who
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: get concerned about big, heavy games that are really complicated
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: and take a long time. I'm like, this is not that.
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: This is a quick, straightforward game that you can play.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: And I think it plays four or five people think
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: up to five. Okay, it does really well with two
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: as well. Two players work just fine. There's like one
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: slight modification to the scoring criteria, but that's pretty much it.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 2: Okay, cool, Yeah, all.
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: Right, so yeah those are recommendations. We're going super long,
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: so we got to wrap this one up. Is there
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: anything you would like to add or anything that I
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: forgot before we say or goodbyes?
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 2: Not today?
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: All right, thank you all for joining us. This is Abraham,
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: this is Shane. We're out bye.
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 5: You've been listening to why we do what we Do.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 5: You can learn more about this and other episodes by
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 5: going to WWDWWD podcast dot com. Thanks for listening, and
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 5: we hope you have an awesome day.