Babies believe crime deserves punishment: Study

Early judgment

In contrast, younger babies prefer to see individuals being nice to one another — even when that means that someone is nice to a character who deserves a slap on the wrist, found the researchers.

“This study helps to answer questions that have puzzled evolutionary psychologists for decades,” lead researcher Kiley Hamlin, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, was quoted as saying by LiveScience.

“Namely, how have we survived as intensely social creatures if our sociability makes us vulnerable to being cheated and exploited? These findings suggest that, from as early as eight months, we are watching for people who might put us in danger,” Hamlin said.
Hamlin and her team had previously found that babies prefer individuals who do nice things for others. But whether they would always want to see niceness for niceness’ sake, or whether mean individuals might be an exception to this rule. So they carried out a series of experiments using puppets to act out scenarios of helping and harming while each of 32 five-month-olds and 32 eight-month-olds watched separately.

The puppets were first sh­own struggling to open a box containing a toy, while another either jumped in to help or cruelly slammed the lid shut. Next, the infants watched as the puppet that had helped or hindered played with a ball and dropped it. A third puppet then came into the scene, either to take the pu­ppet’s ball away or to hand it back.
The researchers wanted to know if the babies would prefer the ball-giving puppet or the one that took the ball aw­ay.

It was found that five-month-olds always preferred the ball-giver, no matter whether the puppet that had dropped the ball had been mean or helpful in the previous scene.
The findings, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that at this young age babies simply like others to be nice.

But eight-month-olds were more discerning. They liked it when the third puppet gave the ball back to a previously helpful puppet. But they didn’t like it when the third puppet helped out a previously unhelpful puppet.

In scenarios involving the mean, toy box-slamming puppet, eight-month-olds favoured a third puppet taking its ball away by 13 to three.

The researchers then repeated the experiments with 32 toddlers, aged 19 months to 23 months, and found that they meted out justice according to the puppets’ earlier actions. The findings show that babies develop a sense of justice between 5 and 8 months of age, Hamlin said.

“We find that, by eight months, babies have developed nuanced views of reciprocity and can conduct these complex social evaluations much earlier than thought,” she said.
Although this sense of justice may be learned, Hamlin said, the early age at which it develops suggests that an urge to punish antisocial types may be partially innate.