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posted by janrinok on Saturday June 18 2022, @11:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the was-Betteridge-born-with-a-moral-compass? dept.

Researchers from Osaka University find that infants can make moral judgments on behalf of others:

For millennia, philosophers have pondered the question of whether humans are inherently good. But now, researchers from Japan have found that young infants can make and act on moral judgments, shedding light on the origin of morality.

[...] Punishment of antisocial behavior is found in only humans, and is universal across cultures. However, the development of moral behavior is not well understood. Further, it can be very difficult to examine decision-making and agency in infants, which the researchers at Osaka University aimed to address.

"Morality is an important but mysterious part of what makes us human," says lead author of the study Yasuhiro Kanakogi. "We wanted to know whether third-party punishment of antisocial others is present at a very young age, because this would help to signal whether morality is learned."

To tackle this problem, the researchers developed a new research paradigm. First, they familiarized infants with a computer system in which animations were displayed on a screen. The infants could control the actions on the screen using a gaze-tracking system such that looking at an object for a sufficient period of time led to the destruction of the object. The researchers then showed a video in which one geometric agent appeared to "hurt" another geometric agent, and watched whether the infants "punished" the antisocial geometric agent by gazing at it.

"The results were surprising," says Kanakogi. "We found that preverbal infants chose to punish the antisocial aggressor by increasing their gaze towards the aggressor."

Accompanying video.

Journal Reference:
Kanakogi, Y., Miyazaki, M., Takahashi, H. et al. Third-party punishment by preverbal infants. Nat Hum Behav (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01354-2


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2022, @12:49AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2022, @12:49AM (#1254309)

    Are they suggesting that these kids had an abstract notion of good and evil, or something more akin to an ethical code with rules of conduct baked in regardless of moral judgements?

    Their description of the system suggested that the kids were kids were punishing an apparent (virtual) malefactor, but how do we know that they weren't instead inclined to keep an eye on the malicious out of self-defence? There's a big gap between intention and interpretation. I don't buy their thesis based on their description.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by optotronic on Sunday June 19 2022, @01:29AM

    by optotronic (4285) on Sunday June 19 2022, @01:29AM (#1254312)

    It seems all they showed is that the kids looked at the malefactor. I didn't read the article, but presuming punishment seems like a leap.

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Reziac on Sunday June 19 2022, @02:49AM (2 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Sunday June 19 2022, @02:49AM (#1254317) Homepage

    That was my thought too -- this sounds more like keeping a wary eye on a potential threat. Even a cat will do that much, and I doubt the average cat has a moral compass.

    --
    And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Fuzzums on Sunday June 19 2022, @10:37AM (1 child)

      by Fuzzums (2009) on Sunday June 19 2022, @10:37AM (#1254366)

      Cats do. You will be punished for your immoral behaviour (leaving the cat aline) after your vacation by ignoring you for days.

      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday June 19 2022, @01:01PM

        by Reziac (2489) on Sunday June 19 2022, @01:01PM (#1254389) Homepage

        Well, the feline moral code is a little different from the human one... I think it goes something like "Me boss, you slave. Pet me NOW."

        --
        And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2022, @02:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2022, @02:32PM (#1254399)

    I had a colleague who worked directly on such infant studies in psychology, and even she basically said that >90% of the time they're utter BS.

    Here's why.

    (1) So, if you have pre-verbal toddlers or older infants, they actually have motor control to turn their heads. Younger infants don't. So, the first element of subjectivity comes in because the only thing they have is "how long the infant stares" at something. Studies like this are a little better than they were 20 years ago when "how long the infant stares" was just a completely subjective variable based on the research looking at the footage and determining whether the kid was looking away or still focused. Now, with eye tracking software, it's a little more quantitative, but the boundary is still nebulous.

    (2) Mothers are generally wary about letting random researchers "do experiments" on their kids. So, as it looks like happened in this video, generally the infant is seated on their mother's lap during the stimuli. How do we know the mothers aren't giving subtle cues that bias the infants in terms of how they're holding them or where the moms are looking? The answer is that we often don't. One thing we DO know pretty well is that infants are pretty good at picking up subtle cues from moms.

    (3) Then we get into the real problem, which is interpretation of WHY infants stare LONGER at certain things. In a psychology seminar I once wrote a paper that analyzed the results of a particular author over several experiments. Literally the same author in the same lab would come to different explanations for staring based on what supported her thesis. In one case, staring longer was evidence (supposedly) that a stimulus was "novel" and infants are attracted to novelty. (In this case, the stimulus was supposed to be something "wrong," an auditory stimulus that didn't conform to normal expectations.) Then, a very similar experiment done a year or two later with similar stimuli and design concluded that infants stared longer because the stimulus was "preferred" by the infants since it (supposedly) conformed to innate preferences for auditory stimuli. Again, this is the same author, same lab, very similar design. Different conclusions based simply on which was the data went: one time the infants were confused and attentive because something was weird; the next time they were attentive because they liked it. Supposedly. THIS GOES ON ALL THE TIME with these types of studies.

    (4) In the case of the present article, if you follow the link to the full study, you will find they attempted three "control" conditions to supposedly throw out other possible explanations for attention to the aggressor. Only the last one of those three is somewhat convincing, that is -- infants seem to make less of a distinction or care less about looking at the stuff if it's just random geometrical figures colliding, instead of blocks WITH FACES on them showing reactions. Okay, that's not surprising as infants clearly react to faces and things with facial characteristics.

    But the other two "control" conditions don't really allow the researchers to conclude motivation for the infants. There's a lot of discussion about "self-agency" and how the infants reacted in this experiment. (And no, they're not talking about "agency" to choose what to look at -- it has something to do with "aggressor" dynamics and some abstract concept of "agency" that the infants may or may not recognize.) This age of infant barely has object permanence, let alone a sense of what the hell "self-agency" is and how it may apply to some blocks bumping each other.

    Bottom line: there are all sorts of reasons why the infants may have stared at the aggressive block longer sometimes. Maybe they were shocked by its punishment and quietly thinking, "Why is he being hit? He's being the strong one and is supposed to hit others!" Maybe they were approving of the punishment. Maybe they were keeping a close eye on an aggressor out of concern/fear. Maybe... maybe... well, you get the point. There are quite a few explanations I could come up off the top of my head that aren't even addressed at all in the possible "control" conditions or discussion.

    Which is typical for infant studies. Take most of them with HUGE grain of salt. My default is to assume they are complete BS (especially in their interpretation) until proven otherwise. At best, they generally just tend to show a difference in attention for a particular stimulus. The" why" explanations generally tend to tell us more about the team running the experiment and what they WANT to prove rather than something we can actually conclude based on infant behavior.