This bold theory suggests that the reasoning of babies turns out to be much more sophisticated, and includes a theory of how things and people work. But how can one detect such reasoning in a child that doesn’t yet talk? Gergely solved it in a simple, elegant way. Imagine an analogous situation in everyday life. A person is walking with many bags and opens a door handle with an elbow. We all understand that door handles are not meant to be opened with your elbow and the person did that because there was no other option. What would happen if we replicated this idea in Meltzoff’s experiment? The same actor arrives, loaded down with bags, and pushes the button with their head. If the babies are simply imitating the actor, they would do the same. But if, on the other hand, they are capable of thinking logically, they will understand that the actor pushed it with their head because their hands were full and, therefore, all the babies needed to do to get the colourful lights and sounds was to push the button, with any part of their body.
They carried out the experiment. The baby observed the actor, laden with shopping bags, pushing the button with their head. Then the child sits on their mother’s lap and pushes the button with their hands. It is the same baby that, upon seeing the actor do the same thing but with their hands free, had pushed the button with their head.
One-year-olds construct theories on how things work based on what they observe. And among those observations is that of perceiving other people’s perspectives, working out how much they know, what they can and cannot do. In other words, exploring science.
The good, the bad and the ugly
We began this chapter with the arguments of the empiricists, according to which all logical and abstract reasoning occurs after the acquisition of language. But nevertheless we saw that even newborns form abstract and sophisticated concepts, that they have notions of mathematics, and display some understanding of language. At just a few months old, they already exhibit a sophisticated logical reasoning. Now we will see that young children who do not yet speak have also forged moral notions, perhaps one of the fundamental pillars of human social interaction.
The infants’ ideas of what is good, bad, fair, property, theft and punishment–which are already quite well established–cannot be fluently expressed because their control tower (circuits in the prefrontal cortex) is immature. Hence, as occurs with numerical and linguistic concepts, the infants’ mental richness of moral notions is masked by their inability to express it.
One of the simplest and most striking scientific experiments to demonstrate babies’ moral judgements was done by Karen Wynn in a wooden puppet theatre with three characters: a triangle, a square and a circle. In the experiment, the triangle goes up a hill. Every once in a while it backs up only to later continue to ascend. This gives a vivid impression that the triangle has an intention (climbing to the very top) and is struggling to achieve it. Of course, the triangle doesn’t have real desires or intentions, but we spontaneously assign it beliefs and create narrative explanations of what we observe.
A square shows up in the middle of this scene and bumps into the triangle on purpose, sending it down the hill. Seen with the eyes of an adult, the square is clearly despicable. As the scene is replayed, the circumstances change. While the triangle is going up, a circle appears and pushes it upwards. To us the circle becomes noble, helpful and gentlemanly.
This conception of good circles and bad squares needs a narrative–which comes automatically and inevitably to adults–that, on the one hand, assigns intentions to each object and, on the other, morally judges each entity based on those intentions.
As humans, we assign intentions not only to other people but also to plants (‘sunflowers seek out the sun’), abstract social constructions (‘history will absolve me’ or ‘the market punishes investors’), theological entities (‘God willing’) and machines (‘damn washing machine’). This ability to theorize, to turn data into stories, is the seed of all fiction. That is why we can cry in front of a television set–it is strange to cry because something happens to some tiny pixels on a screen–or destroy blocks on an iPad as if we were in a trench on the Western Front during the First World War.
In Wynn’s puppet show there are only triangles, circles and squares, but we see them as someone struggling, a bad guy who hinders progress, and a do-gooder who helps. Which is to say that, as adults, we have an automatic tendency to assign moral values. Do six-month-olds have that same abstract thought process? Would babies be able spontaneously to form moral conjectures? We can’t know by asking because they don’t yet talk, but we can infer this narrative by observing their preferences. The constant secret of science consists, precisely, in finding a way of bridging what we want to know–in this case, whether babies form moral concepts–with what we can measure (which objects the babies choose).
After watching one object helping the circle climb the hill and another bumping it down, infants were encouraged to reach for one of them. Twenty-six of twenty-eight (twelve out of twelve six-month-olds) chose the helper. Then, the video recordings of the infants watching the scenes of the helper and the hinderer were shown to an experimentalist. And, relying on their facial gestures and expressions alone, she could predict almost perfectly whether the infant had just seen the helper or the hinderer.
Six-month-old infants, before crawling, walking or talking, when they are barely discovering how to sit up and eat with a spoon, are already able to infer intentions, desires, kindness and evil, as can be deduced from examining their choices and gestures.
He who robs a thief…
The construction of morality is, of course, much more sophisticated. We cannot judge a person to be good or bad just by knowing they did something helpful. For example, helping a thief is usually considered ignoble. Would the babies prefer someone who helps a thief to someone who thwarts one? We are now in the murky waters that are the origins of morality and law. But even in this sea of confusion, babies between nine months and a year of age already have an established opinion.
The experiment that proves it goes like this. Babies see a hand puppet trying to lift the top off a box in order to pull out a toy. Then a helpful puppet shows up and helps it open the lid and get the toy. But in another scene an anti-social puppet jumps maliciously on to the box, slamming it shut and keeping the first puppet from getting at the toy. When choosing between the two puppets, the babies prefer the helper. But here Wynn was going for something much more interesting: identifying what the babies think about stealing from an evildoer, long before they know those words.
To do this she designed a third act for the puppet theatre, and the helper puppet now loses a ball. In some cases, in this garden of forking paths, a new character appears on the scene and returns the ball. At other times, another character comes in, steals it and runs away. The babies prefer the character that returns the ball.
But the most interesting and mysterious part happens when these scenes feature the antisocial puppet that jumped maliciously on the box. In this case, the babies change their preference. They sympathize with the one who steals the ball and runs away. For nine-month-olds, the one who gives the bad guy his comeuppance is more lovable than the one who helps him, at least in that world of puppets, boxes and balls.*
Preverbal babies, still unable to coordinate their hands in order to grab an object, do something much more sophisticated than judging others by their actions. They take into account the contexts and the history, which turns out to give them a pretty sophisticated notion of justice. That’s how incredibly disproportionate cognitive faculties are during the early development of a human being.
The colour of a jersey, strawberry or chocolate
We adults are not unbiased when we judge others. Not only do we keep in mind their previous history and the context of their actions (which we should), but we also have very different opinions of the person committing the actions, or being the victim of them, if they look like us or not (which we shouldn’t).
Throughout all cultures, we tend to form more
friendships and have more empathy with those who look like us. On the other hand, we usually judge more harshly and show more indifference to the suffering of those who are different. History is filled with instances in which human groups have massively supported or, in the best-case scenario, rejected violence directed at individuals who were not like them.
This even manifests itself in formal justice proceedings. Some judges serve sentences displaying a racial bias, most probably without being aware that race is influencing their judgement. In the United States, African American males have been incarcerated at about six times the rate of white males. Is this difference in the incarceration rate a result (at least in part) of the judges having different sentencing practices? This seemingly simple and direct question turns out to be hard to answer because it is difficult to separate this psychological factor from possible racial differences in case characteristics. To overcome this problem Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, found an ingenious solution, exploiting the fact that in the United States cases are randomly assigned to judges. Hence, on average, the type of case and the nature of defendants are the same for all judges. A racial difference in sentencing could potentially be explained by case characteristics or by a difference in the quality of the assigned attorneys (which is not random). But if this were all, then this difference should be the same for all judges. Instead, Mullainathan found a huge disparity–of almost 20 per cent–between judges in the racial gap in sentencing. While this may be the most convincing demonstration that race matters in the courtroom, the method is partly limited since it cannot tell whether the variability between judges’ results is due to some of them discriminating against African Americans, or some judges discriminating against whites, or a mixture of both.
Physical appearance also affects whether someone is likely to be hired in a job interview. Since the early seventies, several studies have shown that attractive applicants are typically judged to have a more appropriate personality for a job, and to perform better than their less attractive counterparts. Of course, this was not just a matter of comment. Applicants who were judged to be more attractive were also more likely to be hired. As we will see in Chapter 5, we all tend to make retrospective explanations that serve to justify our choices. Hence the most likely timeline for this line of argument is like this: first the interviewer decides to hire the applicant (among other things based on his or her beauty) and only then generates ad hoc a long list of attributes (he or she was more capable, more suited for the job, more reliable …) that serve to justify the choice which indeed had nothing to do with these considerations.
The similarities that generate these predispositions can be based on physical appearance, but also on religious, cultural, ethnic, political or even sports-related questions. This last example, because it is presumed to be more harmless–although, as we know, even sporting differences can have dramatic consequences–is easier to assimilate and recognize. Someone forms part of a consortium, a club, a country, a continent. That person suffers and celebrates collectively with that consortium. Pleasure and pain are synchronized between thousands of people whose only similarity is belonging to a tribe (sharing a jersey, a neighbourhood or a history) that unites them. But there is something more: pleasure at the suffering of other tribes. Brazil celebrates Argentina’s defeats, and Argentina celebrates Brazil’s. A fan of Liverpool cheers for the goal scored against Manchester United. When rooting for our favourite sports teams, we often feel less inhibited about expressing Schadenfreude, our pleasure at the suffering of those unlike us.
What are the origins of this? One possibility is that it has ancestral evolutionary roots, that the drive collectively to defend what belonged to one’s tribe was advantageous at some point in human history and, as a result, adaptive. This is merely conjecture but it has a precise, observable footprint that can be traced. If Schadenfreude is a constituent aspect of our brains (the product of a slow learning process within evolutionary history), it should manifest itself early in our lives, long before we establish our political, sports or religious affiliations. And that is exactly how it happens.
Wynn performed an experiment to ask whether infants prefer those who help or harm dissimilar persons. This experiment was also carried out in a puppet theatre. Before entering the theatre, a baby between nine and fourteen months old, seated comfortably on their mother’s lap, chose between crackers or green beans. Apparently, food choices reveal tendencies and strong allegiances.
Then two puppets came in, successively and with a considerable amount of time between the two entrances. One puppet demonstrates an affinity with the baby and says that it loves the food the child has chosen. Then they leave and, just as before, there is another scene where the puppet with similar taste is playing with a ball, drops it and has to deal with two different puppets: one who helps and the other who steals the ball. Then babies are asked to pick up one of the two puppets and they show a clear preference for the helper. One who helps someone similar to us is good. But when the puppet who loses the ball is the one who had chosen the other food, the babies more often choose the ball robber. As with the thief, it is gastronomic Schadenfreude: the babies sympathize with the puppet that hassles the one with different taste preferences.
Moral predispositions leave robust, and sometimes unexpected, traces. The human tendency to divide the social world into groups, to prefer our own group and go against others, is inherited, in part, from predispositions that are expressed very early in life. One example that has been particularly well studied is language and accent. Young children look more at a person who has a similar accent and speaks their mother tongue (another reason to advocate bilingualism). Over time, this bias in our gazes disappears but it transforms into other manifestations. At two years old, children are more predisposed to accept toys from those who speak their native language. Later, at school age, this effect becomes more explicit in the friends they choose. As adults, we are already familiar with the cultural, emotional, social and political segregations that emerge simply based on speaking different languages in neighbouring regions. But this is not only an aspect of language. In general, throughout their development, children choose to relate to the same type of individuals they would have preferentially directed their gaze at in early childhood.
As happens with language, these predispositions develop, transform and reconfigure with experience. Of course, there is nothing within us that is exclusively innate; to a certain extent, everything takes shape on the basis of our cultural and social experience. This book’s premise is that revealing and understanding these predispositions can be a tool for changing them.
Émile and Minerva’s owl
In Émile, or Concerning Education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau sketches out how an ideal citizen should be educated. The education of Émile would today be considered somewhat exotic. During his entire childhood there is no talk of morality, civic values, politics or religion. He never hears the arguments we parents of today so often go on about, like how we have to share, be considerate of others, among so many other outlines of arguments for fairness. No. Émile’s education is far more similar to the one Mr Miyagi gives Daniel LaRusso in The Karate Kid, pure praxis and no words.
So, through experience, Émile learns the notion of property at twelve years old, at the height of his enthusiasm for his vegetable garden. One day he shows up with watering-pot in hand and finds his garden plot destroyed.
But oh, what a sight! What a misfortune! […] What has become of my labour, the sweet reward of all my care and toil? Who has robbed me of my own? Who has taken my beans away from me? The little heart swells with the bitterness of its first feeling of injustice.*
Émile’s tutor, who destroyed his garden on purpose, conspires with the gardener, asking him to take responsibility for the damage and gives him a reason to justify it. Thus the gardener accuses Émile of having ruined the melons that he’d planted earlier in the same plot. Émile finds himself embroiled in a conf
lict between two legal principles: his conviction that the beans belong to him because he toiled to produce them and the gardener’s prior right as legitimate owner of the land.
The tutor never explains these ideas to Émile, but Rousseau maintains that this is the best possible introduction to the concept of ownership and responsibility. As Émile meditates on this painful situation of loss and the discovery of the consequences of his actions on others, he understands the need for mutual respect in order to avoid conflicts like the one has just suffered. Only after having lived through this experience is he prepared to reflect on contracts and exchanges.
The story of Émile has a clear moral: not to saturate our children with words that have no meaning for them. First they have to learn what they mean through concrete experience. Despite this being a recurrent intuition in human thought, repeated in various landmark texts of the history of philosophy and education,* today hardly anyone follows that recommendation. In fact, almost all parents express an endless enumeration of principles through discourse that we contradict with our actions, such as on the use of telephones, what we should eat, what we should share, how we should say thank you, sorry and please, not be insulting, etc.
I have the impression that the entire human condition can be expressed with a piñata. If a Martian arrived and saw the highly complex situation that suddenly arises when the papier mâché breaks and the rain of sweets falls out, it would understand all of our yearnings, vices, compulsions and repressions. Our euphoria and our melancholy. It would see the children scrambling to gather up the sweets until their hands can’t hold any more; the one who hits another to gain a time advantage over a limited resource; the father who lectures another kid to share their excessive haul; the overwhelmed youngster crying in a corner; the exchanges on the official market and the black market, and the societies of parents who form like micro-governments to avoid what Garrett Hardin called the tragedy of the commons.
The Secret Life of the Mind Page 4