Just Babies (7 page)

So it’s not surprising that experiments that look for sharing in young children find tenuous results. The psychologist
Celia Brownell and her colleagues adapted an experimental method originally designed to explore altruism in chimpanzees. The researchers placed the child between two levers and offered her the choice to pull one. One lever delivered a treat to the child and a treat to an experimenter sitting on the other side of her. The second lever gave the child one treat but gave nothing to the person on the other side.

When the recipient on the other side was silent, both the eighteen-month-olds and the twenty-five-month-olds pulled the levers at random, making no attempt to give the treat to the adult. When the experimenter said, “I like crackers. I want a cracker,” the twenty-five-month-olds helped, although the younger children still behaved randomly.

In their paper, the researchers focused on the bright side: two-year-olds “voluntarily share valued resources with unrelated individuals when there is no cost to them for doing so.” This is indeed impressive, but I’m intrigued that neither group of children would share without prompting,
even in a situation where they had nothing to lose. My guess is that this was because they were dealing with a strange adult across the table. If it were their parent or grandparent, say, the children would be a lot kinder.

This last point is worth stressing, and we’ll return to it repeatedly throughout the rest of the book—before about the age of four, children show little spontaneous kindness toward strange adults. Now, some of the studies we just discussed do find kind behavior—such as helping—toward adults who aren’t friends or family, but keep in mind that the adults in these studies aren’t actually
that
strange. Before the typical study begins, the child (along with his or her mother or father) typically interacts with the adult experimenter as part of a “warm-up” session, where they engage in friendly reciprocal activities like rolling a ball back and forth. This makes a difference. The psychologists
Rodolfo Cortez Barragan and Carol Dweck find if you don’t have this sort of reciprocal interaction—just a friendly greeting by the adult and warm thanks for agreeing to participate—the extent of later helping by the children drops by about half. My bet is if there were no prior positive interaction at all—if the adult were a true stranger at the moment that he needed help—then there would be little or no spontaneous kindness on the part of the child.

S
O FAR
we have explored people’s responses to, and actions toward, others. But moral beings judge themselves as well. We feel proud of our good acts and guilty for our bad ones; and these moral feelings help us to decide what we should
and shouldn’t do in the future. For adults, at least, psychologists have found
an intimate connection between judging others and judging ourselves. If you tend to empathize with someone, you are also likely to feel guilty for harming him or her. If you are the sort of person who is high in empathy, you are likely to be the type who is prone to guilt.

Self-evaluation in babies is difficult to study, and we know little about its development. It is easy enough to construct a situation in which we show babies a good guy and a bad guy and explore how they respond to these characters. It is harder (though perhaps not impossible) to construct a situation in which we get the babies themselves to behave in different ways and look at their responses to their own goodness or badness.

Still, we can observe signs of self-evaluation early on. Babies and young children often show signs of pride, as in the story of William’s delight when he gave his gingerbread to his little sister. And there is guilt.
Babies in the first year of life show distress when they harm others, and this becomes more frequent as they age.

In 1935, the psychologist Charlotte Buhler reported
a clever experiment on the elicitation of guilt in children. An adult and a child were placed in a room together, and the adult forbade the child to touch a toy that was within his reach. Then the adult turned away and left the room for a moment. The researchers found that all of the one- and two-year-olds “understand the prohibition as cancelled at the moment that the contact with the adult is broken, and play with the toy.” But when the adult suddenly returns, 60
percent of the sixteen-month-olds and 100 percent of the eighteen-month-olds “show the greatest embarrassment, blush, and turn to the adult with a frightened expression.” The twenty-one-month-olds “attempted to make good what happened by returning the toy quickly to its place.” The fear showed by the children might have been devoid of moral content, but the embarrassment—the blushing!—shows that something else was going on as well. Such reflexive displays of guilt were replaced with explicit acts of moral self-justification as the children got older: the two-year-olds in the study attempted to “motivate the disobedience, for example, by claiming the toy as their own.”

As we have seen, babies are sensitive to the good and bad acts of others long before they are capable of doing anything good or bad themselves. It seems likely, then, that the “moral sense” is first extended to others and then at some later point in development turns inward. At this point, children come to see themselves as moral agents, and this recognition manifests itself through guilt, shame, and pride.

W
E
’
VE
seen certain limitations on children’s empathy and compassion, but this should not distract us from how impressive it is to find such moral behavior and sentiments in creatures so young. Samuel Johnson said it best (in a very different context): “It’s like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

But our natural compassion would have been no surprise to Darwin, or to many of the scientists, philosophers,
and theologians who preceded him. It was a conclusion eloquently expressed by one of the heroes of this book. Adam Smith is best known for his 1776 work,
The Wealth of Nations
, which makes the case that prosperity can emerge from the interactions of selfish agents. But he never believed that people were wholly self-interested beings; he was exquisitely sensitive to
the psychological pull of compassion. In
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
, he begins with three sentences that make the point with eloquence and force:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility.

3

F
AIRNESS
, S
TATUS
,
AND
P
UNISHMENT

The comedian Louis C.K. has a routine in which he talks about his daughter’s understanding of fairness. He begins, “My five-year-old, the other day, one of her toys broke, and she demanded that I break her sister’s toy to make it fair.” This would make the sisters
equal
, but the joke is that something here doesn’t feel right: “And I did. I was like crying. And I look at her. She’s got this creepy smile on her face.”

Other intuitions about fairness are simpler. Imagine you have two toys and two children, and you give both toys to one child. If the other child is old enough to speak, she will object. She might say, “That’s not fair!” and she’d be correct. An even split would maximize the overall happiness of the children—give each child one toy and they’re both happy; divide them unevenly, and the child who gets nothing is miserable, her sadness outweighing the extra pleasure of the child who gets two. But more to the point, it’s just wrong to establish an inequity when you don’t have to.

Things quickly get more complicated. Questions about equality and fairness are among the most pressing moral issues in the real world. For instance, most everyone agrees that a just society promotes equality among its citizens, but blood is spilled over what sort of equality is morally preferable: equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Is it fair for the most productive people to possess more than everyone else, so long as they had equal opportunities to start with? Is it fair for a government to take money from the rich to give to the poor—and does the answer change if the goal of such redistribution is not to help the poor in a tangible sense but just to make people more equal, as in Louis C.K.’s story of breaking his other daughter’s toy?

The psychologist
William Damon, in a series of influential studies in the 1970s, used interviews to explore what children think about fairness. He found that they focus on equality of outcome and ignore other considerations. As an illustration, consider this snippet from one of his studies (children are being asked about an uneven division of pennies):

Experimenter:
Do you think anyone should get more than anyone else?

Anita
(seven years, four months): No, because it’s not fair. Somebody has thirty-five cents and somebody has one penny. That’s not fair.

Experimenter:
Clara said she made more things than everybody else and she should get more money.

Anita:
No. She shouldn’t because it’s not fair for her
to get more money, like a dollar, and they get only about one cent.

Experimenter:
Should she get a little more?

Anita:
No. People should get the same amount of money because it’s not fair.

You see
the same equality bias in younger children. The psychologists Kristina Olson and Elizabeth Spelke asked three-year-olds to help a doll allocate resources (such as stickers and candy bars) between two characters who were said to be related to the doll in different ways: sometimes they were a sibling and a friend to the doll; at other times, a sibling and a stranger, or a friend and a stranger. Olson and Spelke found that when the three-year-olds received an even number of resources to distribute, they almost always wanted the doll to give the same amount to the two characters, regardless of who they were.

The equality bias is strong. Olson and another researcher, Alex Shaw, told children between the ages of six and eight a story about “Mark” and “Dan,” who had cleaned up their room and were to be rewarded with erasers: “I don’t know how many erasers to give them; can you help me with that? Great. You get to decide how many erasers Mark and Dan will get. We have these five erasers. We have one for Mark, one for Dan, one for Mark, and one for Dan. Uh oh! We have one left over.”

When researchers asked, “Should I give [the leftover eraser] to Dan or should I throw it away?” the children almost always wanted to throw it away. The same finding held
when researchers emphasized that neither Mark nor Dan would know about the extra eraser, so there could be no gloating or envy. Even here, the children wanted equality so much that they would destroy something in order to get it.

I wonder if adults would do the same. Imagine being given five one-hundred-dollar bills, to be placed into two envelopes, with each envelope to be sent to a different person. There’s no way to make things equal, but still, would you really put the fifth bill into a shredder? The children in the Shaw and Olson studies seem to care about equality a little bit too much, and one might wonder if this single-minded focus was due to their experiences outside the home. After all, the preschools and day cares where American psychologists get most of their subjects are typically institutions in which norms of equality are constantly beaten into children’s heads; these are communities where every child gets a prize and everyone is above average.

This sort of experience probably has some influence. But a series of recent studies shows that an equality bias emerges long before schools and day cares have a chance to shape children’s preferences.

In one of these studies, the psychologists Alessandra Geraci and Luca Surian showed ten- and sixteen-month-olds puppet shows in which a lion and a bear each distributed two multicolor disks to a donkey and a cow. The lion (or the bear, on alternate trials) gave each animal one disk, and the bear (or the lion) gave one animal two disks and the other nothing. The children were then shown the lion and the bear and asked, “Which one is the good one?
Please show me the good one.” The ten-month-olds chose randomly, but
the sixteen-month-olds preferred the fair divider.

The psychologists Marco Schmidt and Jessica Sommerville did a similar study with fifteen-month-olds, using actual people instead of toy animals but, again, showing a fair division and an unfair division. They found that
the fifteen-month-olds looked longer at the unfair division, suggesting that they found it surprising. (A control study ruled out the possibility that toddlers just look longer at asymmetric displays.)

Other research suggests that
children can sometimes override their focus on equality. In an experiment by psychologists Stephanie Sloane, Renee Baillargeon, and David Premack, nineteen-month-olds observed as two individuals playing with toys were told by a third party to start cleaning up. When both individuals cleaned up, the toddlers expected the experimenter to later reward them equally, looking longer if she didn’t. But when one character did all the work and the other was a slacker who continued to play, babies looked longer when the experimenter rewarded both characters, presumably because they didn’t expect equal reward for unequal effort.

Also, when given an uneven number of resources to distribute,
children are smart about what to do with the extra resources. As mentioned above, six- to eight-year-olds would rather toss away a fifth eraser than have an unequal division between two characters who cleaned a room. But if you just add one sentence—“Dan did more work than
Mark”—almost all children change their answers. Instead of throwing away the eraser, they want to hand it over to Dan. Remember also the experiment in which children got to distribute resources through a doll and, when there was an even number of resources, tended to distribute them equally. The same researchers found that if there was an odd number of resources and children weren’t given the option of throwing one away, three-year-olds would have the doll give more to siblings and friends than to strangers; give more to someone who had previously given the doll something than to someone who hadn’t; and give more to someone who was generous to a third person than to someone who wasn’t.