Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
UNITED KINGDOM, May 9, 2010: Researchers asked infants of various ages to choose between characters which they had seen behaving well or badly, and found they overwhelmingly favored the “good” characters.
The research, which is being pioneered by a team of psychologists from the Infant Cognition Centre at Yale University, Connecticut, contradicts the belief promoted by psychologists such as Sigmund Freud that babies are born “amoral animals” and acquire a sense of right and wrong through conditioning.
Paul Bloom, the professor of psychology who heads the study team, said: “A growing body of evidence … suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. “We now know that in the first six months babies learn things much quicker than we thought possible. What they are born with and what they learn is difficult to divide.”