Ever gaze into a baby’s eyes and think, “You are a little sociopath”? Thankfully, you’re wrong — a new study shows that babies as young as six months demonstrate a sense of morality, suggesting that we are born with the ability to know good from evil, and making it harder to train an army of evil babies. From PhysOrg:
The research was carried out by a team led by Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University in Connecticut in the US, and used the ability to differentiate between unhelpful and helpful behavior as their indicator of moral judgement. The results contradict the theories of Sigmund Freud and others, who thought human beings start out as “amoral animals”, or a moral blank state. Bloom said there is mounting scientific evidence that this may not be true and that “some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone.”
