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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."
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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2022, @05:24PM (4 children)
Either Soylentnews has a bug that misplaced this rant into the wrong thread, or some bot messed up its programming and put this in the wrong thread.
I don't think I've seen this bug in soylentnews yet (although I haven't really been looking) but I admit that this seems word-salady enough to be a bot. Does anyone else read, for example: "But no cost is too little for any of the things that they want" as being oxymoronic?
Hoping that the editors can check in on this, just in case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2022, @07:04PM (1 child)
Too on-topic for bot behavior, and have you seen some of the rants that go on around here?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 19 2022, @09:46PM
Nah, bots would be able to connect generic morality stuff to rants about republicans. The actual content is off-topic, but it feels like bot placement.
Or I suppose that it could be a spam farm testing things somehow. Our homegrown lunatics don't generally sound like that.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday June 20 2022, @06:27PM (1 child)
Because, as we all know, it is completely impossible for a human to make an offtopic post.
Cleary it's robots, controlled by humans, controlled by the DNC mind control ray. It's the only explanation that makes sense!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 21 2022, @03:00AM
You saying it's zombieMDC? APK-the-insane? Or is gewg_ back for more?
This level of misplacement is pretty crazy in itself.