Week 7 Flashcards
Moral development overview
Biologists have long been interested in how a species like ours — in which large groups of nonkin work together on projects of mutual benefit — could come to exist… [T]here are by now several candidate theories for how our complex social structures can arise. These include the accounts developed in the 1970s and 1980s based on kin selection and reciprocal altruism… as well as theories based on group selection… Such theories explain our complex social structures as grounded in certain propensities that we can view as moral, including altruism to nonkin, guilt at betraying another, and righteous anger toward cheaters. While the details are a matter of considerable debate, the notion of unlearned moral universals is consistent with what we now know about biological evolution.
Wynn & Bloom, 2014, p. 435
A recurring question in psychology is: are we born as blank slates, or do we have preprogramed characteristics? This includes theorising as to the origins of our moral values and whether humans are inherently evil.
Watch the lecture from Paul Bloom (2016), Just babies: The origin of good and evil (Links to an external site.). While just over an hour long, it is worth watching as it provides some key insights into the morality of infants.
In the following video, Dr Felix Warneken of Harvard University attempts to uncover whether selflessness, or altruism, is a learned or innate behaviour in the human species. Watch this video before you dive deeper into the theories and concepts behind moral development in young humans. Of particular interest is the experiment (at 5.28 in) where the child shows prosocial behaviour in opening the cabinet for the confused Dr Warneken.
Precursors to moral thinking in infancy
The beginning of moral principles can be seen in babies as young as few months old who become distressed at the sound of others’ cries (Sagi & Hiffman, 1976 in Wynn & Bloom, 2014) as well as Charles Darwin’s experience with his six-month-old son’s sadness at that of his nurses. Read more about this in Moral sentiments (Links to an external site.) (Wynn & Bloom, 2014, pp. 436-437)
The development of moral reasoning
The readings this week point to early altruistic and prosocial behaviour in infants and toddlers. The following activity is based on the studies outlined by Wynn & Bloom in ‘The moral baby’ (2014, pp. 439-445). Select each of the titles to briefly explore the outlined studies before diving deeper into the ideas and findings in the reading.
Hill
Infants witnessed a character— a painted wooden block with googly eyes glued onto it— repeatedly try to ascend a steep incline. On some attempts, a second character (another block with eyes, of a different shape and colour) helped the Climber up the hill by nudging it from behind; on other attempts, a third character interfered with the Climber’s efforts by pushing it downhill. Following habituation, an experimenter the infant was encouraged to express its preference by reaching for one of them. Both six and ten month-old infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual. Further studies showed infants prefer a helpful character to a neutral one, and prefer a neutral character to one who hinders.
Box
Five and nine month-old infants saw a puppet attempting to pry up the lid of a box, where the lid kept falling back down after being raised partway. On alternating attempts, a ‘prosocial’ puppet helped the other to successfully open the box. An ‘antisocial’ puppet prevented the first puppet from opening the box. All ages of infants chose the ‘prosocial’ puppet over the ‘antisocial puppet.
Ball
Five month-old infants saw a puppet playing with a small ball. In alternating events, this puppet rolled the ball toward:
a ‘prosocial’ puppet, who picked it up and rolled it back to the protagonist an ‘antisocial’ puppet, who picked it up and ran offstage with it.
All ages of infants chose the ‘prosocial’ puppet over the ‘antisocial’ puppet.
Read Chapter 5: The development and evolutionary origins of human helping and sharing (Links to an external site.) (Schroeder, Graziano, Warneken, & Tomasello, 2015, pp. 100–113).
- one school of thought is that humans are basically selfish creatures and these altruistic acts derive from conformity to prosocial norms.
- another school of thought is that humans have a biological predisposition for altruism that does not originate in social norms.
- research has focused on the origins of human altruistic behaviours by studying human children and comparing their behaviour to our closest primate relatives.
- we can draw inferences about those aspects of human altruism that may have deep evolutionary roots, before the emergence of human culture and those aspects that are unique to humans and are thus due to more recent human-specific evolutionary and/or cultural forces.
Helping:
- helping is an important sense parasitic on such self-serving goals that is to say, teh only value of an act of helping is with respect to the self-serving goals of recipient of that help.
- 18 month olds - 10 different situations - adults having trouble - in these kinds of situations, children displayed spontaneous, unrewarded helping behaviours in a variety of ways.
- 14 month olds act helpfully, although at this early age only with cognitively less demanding tasks.
- 12 - 18 months - help others by providing helpful information.
- When children begin to point, they use this newly acquired communicative device not only for the straightforward selfish reason to request objects from others but also to help others find what they are looking for.
- young children differentiate between a displaced object that the person actially needs for the task at hand and a displaced distracted object that is irrelevant.
- it is reported that children take into account whether the protagonist is knowledgeable or ignorant of the actual location of an object.
- such results would suggest that these young children actually help others with their goald and do not blindly assist in completing any concrete action that another person.
- over the course of the second year of life, children need ever less cues to intervene on the others behalf. 1.5 - 2.5 age were more likely to help in the absence of any communicative cues from teh recipient when the person struggled to reach for an out-of-reach object, compared with situations which probably require more inferential steps in how to intervene.
- This is congruent with an experiment in which 14 month old infants helped in simpler problem situations but not in mire complex tasks such as opening a novel box for the other or holding a cabinet door.
- Soon after their 1st bday, children begin to help others in simple situations such as helping another person gain an out-of-reach object and become increasingly more sophisticated over the 2nd year, being able to infer goals from situational cues and without direct communication from the recipient.
- children helping is driven by an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic motivation.
What childrens helping behaviours reveal about human altruism:
- rule out the claim that children are initially oblivious to the needs of others and help on when promised concrete rewards.
- it is possible that parental reinforcement had shaped these behaviors before testing
- problems - 1. natural observations of children show that parents do not appear to systematically reinforce altruistic behaviours with tangible rewards but most of the time just acknowledge the helpful act. 2. even if rewards occurred, 14 - 18 months would have had little opportunity to be reinforced for helping 3. studies with older children show that the inducement of altrustic behaviours through concrete reinforcement does not transfer to other types of situations or interactions with other people, when the incentive disappears so does the bheaviour.
- perhaps children are particularly adept social learners when it comes to helping behaviours or perhaps adults are particularly motivated to raise altruistic offspring.
Helping in Chimps and Bonobos:
- chimps engage in instrumental helping behaviours and do so with some flexibility.
- without reward
- out-of-reach tasks did not help reliably in other tasks
- the most likely explanation for this is that individuals failed to help in these situations not because they necessarily lacked the motivation to help but because they put higher demands on their social cognition.
- chimps appear to have the basic cognitive skills and the motivation to on occasion act on behlaf of others in instrumental helping situations
- the fact that chimps lack the socialisation practices and cultural norms purported to explain the emergence of altruism in human but still show basic altruistic tendencies negates the notion of socialisation as the primary factor of human altruism.
Sharing:
- requires that the altruist sacrifice resources under her control which she might otherwise keep to herself.
- sharing of resources can be regarded as perhaps the prototypical form of altruistic behaviour.
- 2 year olds begin to take into account another persons need when they have the opportunity to share with others
- 18 month olds chose random, 25 month olds children more often chose 1:! option benefiting both themselves and the bystander simultaneously.
- 18 - 24 months children performed costly sharing acts by giving some of their own food to an adult who expressed a desire by making a sad face and requesting sharing with a palm-up gesture.
- this sharing behaviour was not only influenced by the other persons affect in the sharing situations itself, but also by a prior incident.
- 4 - 5 year olds chose an option with equal rewards for oneself and another hild over a selfish optn with a higher payoff to oneself - at least when the recipient was a friend
- children not only prefer equality to inequality they even show advantageous inequity avversion.
- 4 - 8 years of age could decide to either accept or reject certain potential resource allocations.
- children of all age groups frequently rejected allocations that were disadvantageous to them but accepted equal offers.
- all younger children accepted the reverse distributions that woul dbenefit them, 8 year olds frequently rejected these allocations as well. Thus 8 yr olds often chose to destro a resource over receiving more than the other child.
- 3 yr olds peers mostly share resources equally most of the time and even distinguish whether the reward was the outcome of joint, individual or no work.
- more likely to rectify the situation and produce equal outcomes afterc collaboration than both after individual work or a windfall gain.
Sharing Chimps and Bonobos:
- social tolerance appears to be an important constraining factor for chimp cooperation
- this tendency can sometimes even prevent them from mutualistic gains and has thus been hypothesised to be a major constraint for the emergence of collaboration more generally.
- more likely it is a kind of attitudinal reciprocity in which individual chimps have more positive affect toward those who have helped them or shared with them in the past, thus leading to a reciprocal pattern of helping and sharing
- chimp succeed apart, bonobos succeed together - because there was no expectation of competition over the spoils at the end, it was of less importance whether the rewards were easily monopolizable.
- due to their overall greater social tolerance and reduced aggression, bonobos appear to be more likely to engage in sharing behaviours than chimps.
- chimps are not particularly inclined to actively share resources with others
- signaling is important to elicit altruistic motivated behaviours in chimps
- chimps did not help in some of the experiments because it required them to actively provide food.
The scope of Altruistic Behaviours in Humans and Other great apes:
- suggests an evolutionary basis for these behaviours in human beings
- individuals direct interest in the well being of others collaborative foraging also has an element of partner choice
- humans were both biologically and socially selected for collaboration, helping and sharing
Conclusions:
- young children help and share with others to a large extent based on an intrinsic motivation aimed at the well being of others.
- major developmental step appears to occur at the age of 3, shows evidence of understanding the fundamentally prosocial nature of social norms.
- Human children are biologically predisposed to be cooperative and in addition they grow up in an environment that expects them to be a cooperative rewards them for being cooperative and also punishes them in one way or another for not being cooperative
- future research should investigate how these factors contribute to the development of childrens cooperative behaviours.
Read Chapter 20: The moral baby (Links to an external site.) (Wynn & Bloom, 2014, pp. 435–453).
- evolutionary
- development
Moral Sentiment:
- David Hume - pointed out without moral passions, our moral reasoning would be useless - we might know right from wrong, but we would never be motivated to act upon this knowledge.
- there are several moral emotions, including guilt, shame, gratutude, and anger but most developmental research has focused on caring about other people.
- lab findings that young infants just a few months old will become distressed and cry when they hear the cry of another baby
- contemporary research find that such responses are not merely reactions to aversive noise; babise do not cry as much when they hear a recording of their on cry or the cry of an infant chimp
- patting or soothing of others in distress, they found that toddlers often soothe in such situations
- other studies have found that toddlers will voluntarily act to assist an adult experimenter having difficulty with a task such as putting books away in a cupboard or handing clothes on a line,
A moral sense:
- they are sensitive to the valences of different actions
- Premack and Premack 1997 repeatedly presented 1 year olds - suggests that infants found helping action to be similar to a caressing action and a hindering action to be similar to an act of hitting
- Kuhlmeier - found that infants are sensitive to the valence of social interactions in predicting the behaviour of others
- 9 - 10 months but not 5 - 6 months looked longer when the climber approached the hinderer than when it approached the helped, suggesting that they expected the climber to be inclinded to avoid the hinderer but not the helper.
- studies described assessed babies capacity to generate social predictions, they did not proble for the possible presence of early moral evaluation
- 6 - 10 month olds infants overwhelmingly preferred the helpful individual. Babies might be drawn to the helpful individual, they might be repelled by the hindering individual or both.
- findings indicated that both inclinations are at work, babies are drawn to the nice guy are are repelled by the mean one. these findings have recently been extended to 2 social senarios - prosocial and antisocial
- other researchers used a similar infant-choice methodology to find that 1 year olds generag preferences after observing a very different type of social behaviour- fair vs unfair allocation of resources
- Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom 2007 - found that these infants before reaching for the character would look in the characters direction. as predicted we found that 3 months old orient far more toward the prosocial actors than the antisocial ones by a factor over two to one. even at this young age infants attention is already directed toward cooperative, reciprocate individuals and way from non-cooperative individuals.
- like 5 month olds, 3 month olds preferred a neutral character to an antisocial one. this suggests that judging antisocial actors has bad may emerge developmentally prior to assessing prosocial actors as good such a pattern fits well with the so called negativity bias found in adults.
Roles of Intentions
- moral or immoral actions are those done by intentional agents.
- moral actions are typically those thats are done to or directly influence other intentional or at least senate entities.
- the importance of intentional agents and sensate patients motivates us to look again at the infants evaluations in the experiments described above. infants in our studies might be judging the characters actions on the basis of their social impacts but they might also simply be responding to other feature of the interactions.
- in sum, infants responses in our control conditions indicate that in out experimental conditions, they were not responding to superficial perceptual aspects or physical consequences of the action they witnessed.
- Piaget 1965 famously argued thought that children much older than those we have been talking about are largely insensitive to intentions.
- many studies show that infants are capable of distinguishing the intent of an action from it physical consequences - they can identify the intended goal of an action whose outcome is unseen or that fails to achieve the goal
- suggestive evidence that infants are sensitive to agent intent in their evaluations.
- infancy prioritized intent over outcome. these finding indicate that infants can assess the valence of the intention behind an action, distinct from the valence of the actions outcome, and that they can generate a disposition toward an actor on the basis of his or her intent
Reward and Punishment
- not only punishment or shunning of noncooperators themselves but also the punishment or shunning of those who in their turn fail to punish noncooperators may be an important requirement for stabilizing cooperation within the group/
- find that altruistic punishment is rare or non-existent in the small scale of societies of the real world
- 1 study found that the social behaviour of an individual toward a 3 rd party influences how toddlers wish to treat that individual.
- infants may assess the local valences of an action and respond solely on that basis withou regard to the larger context in which it occurs
- 8 months old were more sophisticated, they preferred someone who was nice to aw prosocial individual over one who was mean, but they also preferred an individual who was mean to an antisocial individual over one who was nice
- finding that even infants 8 months old prefer individual who reat do-gooder well, but prefer those who treat evildoers badly highlights an important aspect of our social evaluative judgement.
Final Words:
- infants and toddlers social judgements and responses bear a strong resemblance to those of adults. The early emergence of the evaluation of social action - present already by 3 months of age - suggest that this capacity cannot result entirely from experience in particular cultural environments or exposure to specific linguistic practice and it suggests that there are innate bases that ground some components of our moral cognition.
- finally adults can reason according to impartial codes of fairness and justice, and we can consciously develop systems that dictate appropriate moral action, as we find in law, religion and philosophy and again we dont find this in babies or young children
-the capacity to evaluate an individuals social action as positive o negative and to generate attitudes toward others based on these evaluations - comprises an essential basis of any moral systems that will eventually contain more abstract concepts of right or wring.
Read The roots of human altruism (Links to an external site.) (Warneken & Tomasello, 2011, pp. 455–468).
- common observation that humans are extraordinarily helpful, even tho non-relatives.
- young children also intervene on behalf of others, and in most cases it is unlikely that they are calculating kinship, reciprocity, mating opportunities, cultivating their repuations for helpfulness.
-cultural - encourage and rewarded by adults for being helpful and cooperative - reciprocity to become stable strategy in a social group, it is best if all individuals follow the so-called tot-for-tat strategy in which everyone begins with a predisposition to cooperate and then subsequently does what the other does.
- it might be expected that young children would begin by being cooperative naturally especially when still under the most constant care of their parents.
Forms of Altruism:
- evolutionary biology - understand mechanisms such as kin selection and reciprocal altruism by means of which an organism may perform altruistic acts in the moment and still survive and reproduce in the long run
- human altruism derives from a predisposition that is not preprogrammed for specific acts but allows the generation of acts as diverse as comforting a distressed individual, helping another individual achieve its instrumental goal, sharing food and objects with others, and providing others with helpful information
Ontogenetic roots of instrumental helping:
- cognitive
- motivation
- cognitive - 12 - 18 months understand other persons behaviours in terms of the underlying goals and intentions. can differentiate purposeful from accidental actions and even infer what another person was trying to achieve without actually witnessing the inteded outcome.
- 12 months begin to comfort victims of distress, based upon responses to and alterations of the emotional need of another person ‘emotional helping’
- the only experimental study was that by Rheingold 1982 19 - 32 months, showed that children can perform sophisticated prosocial behaviours and that the children knew the goals of the rituatls
- 18 months old - 10 different situations (Warneken & Tomascello, 2006 article)
found that children display spontaneous, unrewarded helping behaviours wen another person is unable to achieve his goal. Infants did so spontaneously, intervened without being explicityly asked for help and never being rewarded or praised for their effort.
- follow up study - 14 month olds - help spontaneously in situations in which they are able to determine the other person goal. children acting on behalf of others without a benefit for themselves.
- young children even help when the costs for helping are slightly raised. 18 months old infants in a situation in which an object was on the floor and the experimenter was unsuccesfully reaching for it.
- 20 month olds - children continued to help in the majority of cases and did so over repeated trials even when they had the alternative to play an attractive game.
- put effort into helping - 18 months old - what determined childrens helping was the other unfulfilled goal, not an immediate benefit for themselves. this suggests the possibility that young children have an intrinsic motivation to act altruistically.
- 20 month olds - who had received a material reward for helping at a n earlier time were subsequently less likely to engage in further helping than children who had not received such a reward. provides even further evidence that childrens helping is drive by intrinsic motivation.
- 14 - 18 months willing to help multiple times and continue helping even when the costs are raised.
Phylogentic Roots:
- chimps have the cognitive capacity to infer other peoples goals, posses on crucial component for acts of instrumental helping. chimps are guided by self-interest: altruistic motivations are though to be unique to humans, reflecting a species-unique psychology.
- number of anecdotal observations which suggest that chimps might on occasion act altruistically.-
- chimps are competitive, allows for the possibility that when constraints related to food are lifted and the problem situation is made more salient to the potential helper, a different picture ight emerge. In the absence of reward they were able to determine the caregivers goal.
- complex goals may not have been obvious
- human raised chimps develop skills not found in those with less human contact.
- just like human infants, chimp handed the out-of-reach object to the experimenter when he was unsuccessfully reaching for it than when he was not reaching for it.
- thus chimps continued to help even when helping required slightly more effort.
- results showed that chimp helped by releasing the chain in the majority of caeses, subjects were attentive to the recipients gal.
- Melis Hare and Tamasello 2008 - replicated these findings - chimp subjects helped most of the time, but they had a slight tendency to help the previously helpful individual more than the unhelpful one.
- indicate that the altruistic tendency seen in human ontogeny did not evolve in humans de novo.
The development of Altruism:
- children develop altruistic behaviours
- 3 evidence - 1. emerge early in ontogeny before socialisation 2. socialisation practices in early and middle childhood are only effective if they mesh with this predisposition. 3. nonhuman primates display altruistic tendencies in the absence of any socialisation practices.
- 1. early emergence - it seems implausible to assume that our infants helped because they comply with an altruistic norm.
- 2. subsequent socialisation - if reinforcement is used, external rewards can have a detrimntal effect on future behaviours, as shown in our experiemntal study on helping
- 3. altruism in chimps - provides signs of altruism.
Conclusions:
- human cultures cultivate rather than implant altruism in the human psyche
- starting state of altruism in ontogeny is characterised by childrens tendency to help others spontaneously.
- it even appears that relative or a stranger, whether the other will reciprocate, or how their behaviour will affect their reputation.
- for altruism to be sustained as an evolutionary stable strategy, it must be complemented by safety measures to avoid being exploited by others and bias altruism towards certain individuals under certain circumstances.
- 1. when do children begin to direct acts of altruism deferentially towards kin vs non-kin - more directed to family
- reciprocal altruism - based upon the idea that people should help individuals who will be more likely to repay the incurred costs in the future
- direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity describes how people encode 3rd party interactions. this influences how people choose to interact with these individuals who have previously proven to be selfish or altruistic towards other parties and how people themselves act.
- young children become sensitive to and even internalized social norms regulating prosocial behaviour. this means that they will blame others for antisocial acts.
- further research is needed to investigate how children bring to bear their conceptual understanding and categorisation of social partners in their own helping behaviour.
Watch the lecture from Paul Bloom (2016), Just babies: The origin of good and evil (Links to an external site.). While the video is just over an hour long, it is worth watching as it provides some key insights into the morality of infants.
Please find below a summary of the Paul Bloomfield “Just Babies: The Origin of Good and Evil” video that explores the origins of morality. I have included this as the video is part of your essential reading but is also quite lengthy! hope that this helps with your exam preparation
Traditional vs moral views of moral development
Historically, it was believed that humans were born without morality, that we were born ‘savage’ without a ‘moral core’. Previous interpretations of Darwinian theory mirror this belief as it was originally thought that morality was a product of culture. Early developmental psychology theorists also proposed that moral judgement is s something that is developed (e.g. Piaget and Kohlberg) rather than innate. In contrast, modern interpretations of moral development incorporate such concepts of kinship selection.
The argument for moral nativism (that we are born with morality)
Methods used: Research examining moral development in babies generally uses ‘looking time’ methods. Six and 10- month old babies have been found to prefer a prosocial helper rather than a neutral character or antisocial hinderer. Further, six month olds prefer a neutral character over an antisocial character. Babies prefer somebody who has the intention of helping regardless of whether the person succeeds at helping or not. Babies prefer rewarding the ‘good’ character and punishing the ‘bad guy’. Fairness/ Inequity: by about 12-months babies expect equitable distribution and favour characters who are fair. Moral sentiments: babies respond negatively to the pain of others.
The argument against moral nativism
Morality is diverse and can be classified further into three categories of ;
ethics of autonomy (fairness, avoiding harm, helping others, working for positive benefit, equality)… research suggests that some of this is present in infancy,
ethics of community (in group bias (e.g. patriotism) and respect of tradition and authority- status)
this exists in some form in infants
and ethics of divinity
sacred order, natural order, tradition, sanctity, sin and pollution
disgust underlies this type of ethics
disgust can extend to people (e.g. disgusted by cannibalism, beastiality)
babies don’t have ethics of divinity and this is partly because they have not yet developed disgust (in the form described above)
disgust takes longer to moralise in a social context
Conclusion
While there are some aspects of morality that are present during infancy, education and culture are important in the development of complex moral reasoning.
- Warneken & Tomasello conclude material rewards can have detrimental effects as they undermine children’s intrinsic altruistic motivation: (A)
A. True
B. False
- Warneken & Tomasello conducted a study with both 18 month-old children and chimpanzees, where the caregiver was attempting to reach for an out-of-reach object. They concluded: (B)
A. Infants did not help their caregiver when she was attempting to reach for the object.
B. Chimpanzees helped their caregiver when she was attempting to reach for the object.
C. Chimpanzees did not help their caregiver when she was attempting to reach the object.
D. Both the infants and chimpanzees were too young to understand the caregiver needed help.
3.) Warneken & Tomasello conclude that chimpanzees are only willing to help when there is a rewards: (B)
A. True
B. False
4.) Warneken & Tomasello conclude, for young children to engage in sharing, the recipient must: (B)
A. Be present and not engage in any contact or communication.
B. Be present and make their desire or problem explicit.
C. Make their desire or problem explicit but does not need to be present.
D. Be present and make their desire or problem implicit.
5.) The Interdependence Hypothesis suggests: (C)
A. Chimpanzees have evolved to live a much more cooperative lifestyle compared to humans.
B. Chimpanzees and humans have evolved to live interdependently together.
C. Human have evolved to live a much more cooperative lifestyle compared to other apes.
D. Humans and apes have not evolved to be cooperative
