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Infacy Psychology > Morality Guest Lecture > Flashcards

Morality Guest Lecture Flashcards

1
Q

Theoretical perspective:

A
  • Arguments that morality is linked to the evolution of cooperation (be it group hunting, caretaking, etc etc)
  • to cooperate safely, humans need mechanisms to
  • distinguish friends from foes (social evaluation)
  • influence others’ social behaviours (inclusion/exclusion;rewar/punishment)
  • because humans are the most cooperative species on earth (e.g., Tomasello, 2009) we should also be
    the most evaluative and the most retributive
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2
Q

Basic Methodology: Helper/Hinderer Puppet Shows

A

hill (reach hilltop/fall steep)
ball(obtain object/someone elese has it)
box(obtain object/in box,cant lift lid

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3
Q

result

A

babies everytime prefered pro-social behaviour

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4
Q

Maybe low-level perceptual cues?

A

Infants prefer:

  • prefer victims then harmer
  • protectors to non-protectors
  • fair to unfair distributors
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5
Q

Why? Aversion to antisocial, attraction toprosocial, or both? (Hill)

A

10 months

prefer helper vs harmer

prefer helper then nutral(not helping or harming) - very small difference

prefer nultral then harmer - very big difference

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6
Q

Infants’ Social Preferences…WHY?

A
  • A third-party judgment: Infants do not stand to (immediately) gain or lose from these actions
  • Still many possibilities for what babies
    attending to:
  • lowest-level account: something is inherent to the stimuli, not a social judgment at all
  • maybe infants just prefer pushing up to pushing down, ball-leaving to ball-taking, or box-opening to box-closing
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7
Q

Maybe low-level perceptual cues?

A

Infants don’t prefer agentive actors who perform similar acts on inanimate objects

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8
Q

Maybe any action that facilities an agent’s path of movement?

A

Or, about helpful/unhelpful nature of those acts?

Study 1: Prevent some babies from inferring goal, examine choice

1/2 babies: eyes fixed;
gazes uphill:

Clear, though
unfulfilled goal

1/2 babies: eyes unfixed;
gazes downhill:

unclear goal

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9
Q

Maybe any action that facilities an agent’s path of movement?

A

Or, about helpful/unhelpful nature of those acts?

Study 2: Do individual differences in goal inference predict choice?

  • Under some circumstances, infants visually anticipate agents’ goals
    from ~6 months
  • Thought to reflect robust goal understanding
  • 5-month-olds, cartoon hill, brief familiarization (= babies young, &
    we made it hard)

result: babies only like helpers when they understanding what they need help with (what their goal is)

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10
Q

Seems to be social, and about protagonist’s unfulfilled goals

A

But a social preference for helpers need not reflect anything like a moral preference for helpers

alterism or for selfish help for the future(the helper might help me)

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11
Q

One important facet of moral judgment:
Intentions v. Outcomes

A

Two parts of each action that babies could be evaluating in studies to date:
* The outcome for the protagonist
* The intention of the helper/hinderer
* Adults use both, but privilege intention
* Kids notoriously bad at privileging
intention for moral judgment (e.g., Piaget,
1929 & dozens more)
* But, infants appear to focus on intentions in
other situations…

  • 3 cases: Failed Attempts to help/harm,
    Accidental Help/Harm, Ignorant help/harm
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12
Q

Intention/outcome distinction case 2: Failed Attempts

A

3 comparison types:
intent differs, same outcomes
intent pitted against outcome
same intent, different outcome

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13
Q

result

A

outcomes same with different intentions:prefered intension (good)

outcomes same but different intention:prefered intention

failed help vs failed hinder : prefered intention

intention both good- prefer outcome

intention both bad - prefered outcome

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14
Q

accidental

A

they prefered

the intended helper vs the accidental helper

they also prefered the accidental harmer then the intended harmer

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15
Q

Is it always good to intentionally facilitate goals?

A
  • Adults sometimes see intentional goal-blocking as good
  • e.g., bad/dangerous goals
  • e.g., punishment for bad behavior
  • Punishment is a human universal (with X-cultural
    differences); theorized to stabilize cooperative systems
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16
Q
A
  • When adults see others as deserving punishment, we sometimes positively evaluate those who perform it
  • What about infants? 2 act plays
  • Infants see 4 distinct events

act 1

protagonist with unfilled goal

helped act - deserve reward

hindering act - deserve punishment

17
Q

act 2

A

hinder is helped

helper is helped

18
Q

results

A

19 month

like when people who are helper (has helped before) are helped

they dont like when people who are hinders (has hinder before) are helped

19
Q

Will older babies reward/punish themselves?

A

Training: Give each puppy a “treat”
Puppet show: Box OR Ball
Reward OR Punish

20
Q

result

A
  • take treat from mean puppy
  • give treat to good puppy
  • less likely to take away treat from a victam
21
Q

experiment

A
  • Are younger infants motivated to punish? Let them punish with their eyes!
  • Contingency training: When infant looks to a character, a stone crushes it (Exp 1)
  • Infants see one puppet hit another
  • Later, they selectively look to the hitter (replicated in Exp 5)
  • Because they want the hitter to be crushed?
  • They do not selectively look to hitter if trained that something soft falls on
    character they look at (Exp 2), nor if their looking makes stones fall/crush
    randomly (Exp 3), nor if nothing is an agent (Exp 4
22
Q

summary

A
  • Infants prefer prosocial to antisocial others
  • early as 3 months
  • negative info primary
  • Based on acts’ helpful/unhelpful nature
  • not physical cues
  • Based on mental states
  • Sensitive to context
  • Influences own sociomoral behaviours in year 2 (or before!)
23
Q

failed replication

A

But, failed replications!

  • A few failed replications for basic preferences for prosocial over antisocial over the years
  • Generally, there have been far fewer failures than successes
  • Meta-analyses suggest preference robust
  • (But there may be publication bias)
  • Very recent large scale collaborative effort “ManyBabies” to replicate the
    hill study (*Yuen, Lucca, et al., in press).
  • ~500 babies around the world.
  • No systematic preferences

But, failed replications!

24
Q

Were we wrong?

A

Were we wrong?

  • Maybe yes:
  • At the same time as the ManyBabies failure, we have been running a large longitudinal study trying to track moral development from birth - age 3, where we re-ran all puppet show studies
  • No preferences for helpers in any of them
  • Maybe no:
  • Also, failed to replicate a bunch of other findings
  • We replicated a visual preference for helpers in an online study, and several other labs have had successful online replications too
  • in lad failed.at home suceeded(being in a weird enviroment?)
  • Issue with in-lab testing? Recent failures were all post covid (babies spending less time with strangers, experimenters wearing masks, etc).
  • COVID effects will take years to sort out
    Were we wrong?
25
Q

How much experience?

A
  • Even when babies succeed, they have all had 3+ months of experience within the sociomoral world.
  • Maybe they (quickly) learn it
  • What about newborns?
26
Q

Newborns

A
  • Preferentially attend to more over less social stimuli

ex:mother voice vs stranger voice
ex:prefer faces that look at them vs looking away

Also,

  • Goal-directed action
    over non-goal-
    directed (hand) action
  • Action that
    approaches (them)
    versus moves away
    (from them)
27
Q

Do newborns prefer prosocial actions?

A
  • Avg age = 5 days (tested at first checkup)
  • Dual-video preferential looking method
  • 2 trials; videos on opposite sides
  • Two experiments, each with different prosocial/antisocial acts and a matched set of non-social control videos
28
Q

result

A

babies in the social condition - looked more to the helper

babies in the non-social condition; had no preference

even after replication

Infacy Psychology (24 decks)

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