Can infants decipher good from evil?

Sean Duffy

Recently I appeared as an expert on FOX-29 commenting on new research out of Yale that suggests infants can decipher good from evil at six months old. As a researcher focused on infant psychology, I’m excited that this topic has generated interest. But also as a researcher, I’d like to be real about some limitations of the findings. If they gave me 20 minutes on FOX – and not two minutes – here’s what I might have said:

There is no doubt that infants are intelligent creatures, with enormous capacities to learn and grow in leaps and bounds over the course of the first two years of life. Very early on, infants must learn”good” from “evil” in the sense that they must learn  to coordinate their innate reflexes to obtain good, pleasurable sensations and avoid bad, painful ones. One perspective may be that these early lessons elaborate over time into rich, complex structures of understanding good and evil. 

However, in recent years, there has  been a movement toward the assumption that very little is learned over time, but that infants are born with hardwired understanding of moral action.  In one particularly well-known study, researchers showed infants a circle on the way up a hill that is helped by a square and thwarted by a triangle. Then they show the square and the circle dancing; next the circle and the triangle dancing. Infants looked longer at the later dancing partners, because they are surprised that the hapless circle would want to hang out with the hurtful triangle over the helpful square.

Let’s put aside the fact that it is puzzling that an infant who can hardly crawl intuitively understands the challenges of motion and gravity, the difficulty of negotiating inclined planes, that one object may have mental states like “wanting” or goals like “getting up a hill” or the very notion of objects having emotions while “hanging out with each other.” But is the phenomena observed in the study based on infants’ understanding of the triangle’s evil doings or is it also a possibility that the pairing of a triangle and a circle offers more of a distinct difference in basic mass, and is therefore more visually stimulating? We can’t know this because researchers didn’t vary the roles of evil doer and helper or even vary the shapes of dancing partners.

But I know from my own experiments with infants that even creating these variances won’t provide us with absolutes into the minds of infants. What I do know isn’t easy for parents and the public to hear: it’s usually more complicated, folks. Lost in the media reports, and even in the scientific literature, are discussions of the careful control conditions necessary to rule out alternative explanations, like the perceptual preference account noted above.

To gain a deeper understanding into infants, we can’t be so quick to accept whole heartedly findings that give easy answers; as good as they may appear. Because if babies are born into this world knowing everything, like morality, how come toddlers have so much to learn? I’m not saying that babies don’t have the potential to learn. Only that even if they are born with some hardwired understanding of helpful from hurting behaviors, they have a long journey between that rudimentary understanding and their ultimate destination as moral, well-adjusted adults. Parents can be the good squares that swoop down from above and help guide them up that hill.

Sean Duffy is an associate professor of psychology at Rutgers–Camden, where he directs the Culture, Cognition, and Development Laboratory that explores how children and adults perceive the world. He is also an associate with the Rutgers–Camden Center for Children and Childhood Studies, which seeks to develop innovative research and service programs that advance a greater understanding of the needs of children. A resident of Philadelphia, Duffy attended the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. His recent research on perception has gone green: A series of experiments he has conducted examine what really motivates us to recycle.