Moral Reasoning in Infants

The work of Lawrence Kohlberg was an important start to modern research on moral development and reasoning. However, Kohlberg relied on a specific method: he presented moral dilemmas (like the Heinz problem) and asked children and adults to explain what they would do and—more importantly—why they would act in that particular way. Kohlberg found that children tended to make choices based on avoiding punishment and gaining praise. But children are at a disadvantage compared to adults when they must rely on language to convey their inner thoughts and emotional reactions, so what they say may not adequately capture the complexity of their thinking.

Starting in the 1980s, developmental psychologists created new methods for studying the thought processes of children, even of infants long before they acquire language. One particularly effective method is to present children with puppet shows, which grab their attention, and then record nonverbal behaviors, such as looking and choosing, to identify children’s preferences or interests.

A research group at Yale University has been using the puppet show technique to study moral thinking of children for much of the past decade. What they have discovered has given us a glimpse of surprisingly complex thought processes that may serve as the foundation of moral reasoning.

EXPERIMENT 1: Do children prefer givers or takers?

In 2011, J. Kiley Hamlin and Karen Wynn put on puppet shows for very young children: 5-month-old infants. The infants watch a puppet bouncing a ball. We’ll call this puppet the “bouncer puppet.” Two other puppets stand at the back of the stage, one to left and the other to the right. After a few bounces, the ball gets away from the bouncer puppet and rolls to the side of the stage toward one of the other puppets. This puppet grabs the ball. The bouncer puppet turns toward the ball and opens its arms, as if asking for the ball back.

This is where the puppet show gets interesting (for a young infant, anyway!).  Sometimes, the puppet with the ball rolls it back to the bouncer puppet. This is the “giver puppet” condition. Other times, the infant sees a different ending. As the bouncer puppet opens its arms to ask for the ball, the puppet with the ball turns and runs away with it. This is the “taker puppet” condition. Although the giver and taker puppets are two copies of the same animal doll, they are easily distinguished because they are wearing different colored shirts, and color is a quality that infants easily distinguish and remember.

Each infant sees both conditions: the giver condition and the taker condition. Just after the end of the second puppet show (i.e., the second condition), a new researcher, who doesn’t know which puppet was the giver and which was the taker, sits in front of the infant with the giver puppet in one hand and the taker puppet in the other. The 5-month-old infants are allowed to reach for a puppet. The one the child reaches out to touch is considered the preferred puppet.

Remember that Lawrence Kohlberg thought that children at this age—and, in fact, through 9 years of age—are primarily motivated to avoid punishment and seek rewards. Neither Kohlberg nor Carol Gilligan nor Jean Piaget was likely to predict that infants would develop preferences based on the type of behavior shown by other individuals.

The puppet show is over and the experimenter is holding the two dolls—the giver puppet and the taker puppet—in front of the infant. The reaching behavior of the infant is being videotaped for later analysis.What do you think? Make a prediction about the results of this study—which should reflect your own “theory” of children’s ability to judge and care about the types of behavior others display. Do you think infants will choose the taker or the giver puppet? Do you expect the results to be significant?INSTRUCTIONS: Adjust the pink bar on the left to show the percentage of infants who reached for the giver puppet. The yellow bar on the right will automatically adjust to make the total (sum of both bars) equal 100%.

Show Answer

Here are the results from Experiment 1:

Experiment 1 suggests that these 5-month-old infants are not just passive observers in the world. They notice what others do and, if we are interpreting the results of experiments like this one correctly, they distinguish helpful behaviors (“prosocial behaviors”) from behaviors that hurt others (“antisocial behaviors”). But they do more that that. They are attracted to those who are acting in a prosocial way, and they reject those who act in an antisocial way.

These researchers also tested infants who were only 3-months old. These infants were so immature that they did not yet have good control of their arms, so the experimenter could not use “reaching for one of the puppets” as the dependent variable, as they did with the 5-month-olds. Three-month-old infants can control where they look quite well, and previous research has indicated that very young infants will look longer at objects they want. The researchers showed these very young infants the same puppet shows that were described above and then, during the choice phase, they recorded which puppet (giver or taker) the 3-month-olds looked at longer. The results were very similar to those found with the 5-month-olds. A strong majority of younger infants (92%) looked longer at the giver puppet than the taker puppet.

But this isn’t the end of the story…