Nature vs. Nurture. It’s one of the oldest debates in the world. One Yale psychology professor, Paul Bloom, says that his research is lending new credence to the “nature” side of the argument.
“Humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life,” he writes in the New York Times Magazine. “With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”
Blooms researchers showed babies between 6 months and 1 year old puppet shows that depicted morality based situations. Sometimes a puppet would take another puppets toys, sometimes one puppet would help the other up a steep hill. The children almost universally were attracted to the puppets exhibiting “good” behavior and disliked the ones that were mistreating their fellow puppets.
“Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented,” Bloom concludes in The Times. ”Babies possess certain moral foundations — the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness.”
“Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time.” Bloom adds in his Times article. Baby’s ideas about right and wrong don’t always really line up with ours, and it stands to reason that this inherent sense of moral balance can be negatively influenced as well, if it isn’t nurtured properly. What Blooms research really seems to point out is that babies are not nearly as blank and unformed and inhuman as some scientists have assumed. It’s still up to us, as parents, to make sure their fresh new consciousness grows into healthy, balanced adulthood.
