Can babies tell right from wrong? Doctor explains! #babylearning #childdevelopment #parenting

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The moral life of babies (part 1) | ‘Hill Paradigm’ (2007) by J. Kiley Hamlin, Ph.D. & colleagues via
The Infant Cognition Centre at ​⁠​⁠​⁠

Infants as early as 6 months might prefer an individual who “helps another person” to one who “hinders another person”.

Researchers believed these findings constitute evidence that moral evaluation does not require language or complex reasoning & may be a fundamental part of human cognition - even in the preverbal stage.

While the study was groundbreaking, some critics raised questions about alternative explanations, such as whether the infants were responding to perceptual features (e.g., motion or color) rather than social behavior. Follow-up studies addressed these concerns by controlling for such variables, generally supporting the original findings. Overall, the concept of early social evaluation in infants is widely accepted, but researchers continue to investigate the underlying mechanisms and the extent of these abilities. See links below for references:

📚 Original paper - Social evaluation by preverbal infants:
www.nature.com/articles/nature06288

📚Helpers over Hinderers - hill climb appraisal proves to be true:
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4310275/

📚 Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study:
osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qhxkm

📚 3-month-olds show a negativity bias in their social evaluations:
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2966030/