it's a question people have asked for as long as there have been people are human beings inherently good are we born with a sense of morality or do we arrive blank slates waiting for the world to teach us right from wrong or could it be worse do we start out nasty selfish Devils who need our parents teachers and religions to whip us into shape the only way to know for sure of course is to ask a baby but until recently it's been hard to persuade them to open up and share their secrets enter the baby lab this is the creature at the center of the greatest philosophical moral and religious debates about the nature of man the human baby they don't do much can't talk can't write can't expound at length about their moral philosophies but does that mean they don't have one the philosopher rouso considered babies perfect idiots knowing nothing and Yale psychologist Karen win director of the infant cognition Center here the baby lab says from most of its history her field agreed didn't we just think that these creatures at 3 months and even 6 months were basically just little blobs oh sure I mean if you look at them they they kind of look like little I mean cute cute little blobs but they can't do all the things that an older child can they can't even do the things that a dog or a pigeon or a rat can no pulling levers for treats or running mazes for these study subjects but they can watch puppet shows up goes the curtain and wi is part of a new wave of researchers who have discovered seemingly simple ways to probe what's really going on in those adorable little heads up goes the curtain we watched as wi and her team asked a question that 20 years ago might have gotten her laughed out of her field does Wesley here at the ripe old age of 5 months know the difference between right and wrong Wesley watches as the puppet in the center struggles to open up a box with a toy inside the puppy in the yellow shirt comes over and lends a hand then the scene repeats itself but this time the puppy in the blue shirt comes and slams The box shut nice behavior mean Behavior at least to our eyes but is that how a 5-month old sees it and does he have a preference Lesley do you remember these guys from the show to find out a researcher who doesn't know which puppet was nice and which was mean offers Wesley a choice who do you like he can't answer but he can reach that one Wesley chose the good guy and he wasn't alone that one more than three4 of the babies tested reached for the nice puppet that one wi tried it out on even younger babies 3month olds who can't control their arms enough to reach but they can vote with their eyes since research has shown that even very young babies look longer at things they like which one do you like Daisy here looked at the mean puppet for 5 seconds then switch to the nice one for 33 babies even at 3 months looked towards the nice character and looked hardly at all much much much shorter times towards the unhelpful character so basically as young as 3 months old we human beings show a preference for nice people over mean people study after study after study the results are always consistently babies feeling positively towards helpful individuals in the world and uh disapproving disliking maybe condemning uh individuals who are antisocial towards others it's astonishing when and her team first published their findings about baby Morality In the journal Nature in 2007 and they've continued to publish follow-up studies in other peer-review journals ever since for instance on this experiment they showed babies like James here a puppet behaving badly and instead of rolling the ball back to the puppet in the middle this green-shirted bunny keeps the other puppet's ball and runs away then James is shown a second show this time the bunny who we just saw steal the ball tries to open up the box to get the toy will James still prefer the puppet who helps out or will he now prefer the one who slams The Box shut hey who do you like he chose the one who slammed it shut as did 81% of babies test it the study's conclusion babies seem to view the ball Thief as deserving punishment so do you think that babies therefore are born with an innate sense of justice at a very Elemental level I think so we think we see here the foundations for Morality there some way to do the punishment Paul Bloom is also a professor of psychology at Yale with his own la he's collaborated with WN on many of her baby studies and he also happens to be her husband I feel we're making discoveries I feel like we're discovering that what seems to be one way really isn't what seems to be an ignorant and unknowing baby is actually a creature with this alarming sophistication subtle knowledge and he says discovering this in babies who can't walk talk or even crawl yet suggest it has to come buil in so remember BF Skinner who said that we had to teach our children everything through conditioning so does this just wipe him off the map what we're finding in the baby lab is that there's more to it than that that there's a universal moral Court to all human share the seeds of our understanding of Justice our understanding of right and wrong are part of our biological nature which one do you wait a minute if babies are born with a basic sense of right and wrong a universal moral core where does all the evil in the world come from is that all learned well maybe not take a look at this new series of discoveries in the Yale baby lab would you like a snack in offering babies the seemingly small innocuous Choice graham crackers or Cheerios when is probing something big the origins of bias the tendency to prefer others who are similar to ourselves adults will like others who share even even really absolutely trivial similarities with them so will Nate who chose Cheerios over graham crackers hi prefer this orange cat who also likes Cheerios over this gray cat who likes graham crackers instead which one do you like apparently so remember these guys but if babies have positive feelings for the similar puppet do they actually have negative feelings for the one who's different to find out wind showed babies the gray cat the one who liked the opposite food struggling to open up the box to get a toy will Gregory want to see the graham cracker eater treated well or does he want him treated badly which one do you like that one okay Gregory seemed to want the different puppet treated badly that is amazing so he went with his bias in a way you like and so did Nate that one and 87% of the other babies tested from this wi concludes that infants prefer those who harm others who are unlike them what could be more arbitrary than whether you like graham crackers or Cheerios nothing nothing but it matters it matters to the young baby we are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues and that to some extent is the Dark Side of morality we want the other to be punished in our studies babies seem as if they do want the other to be punished we used to think that um we're we taught to hate I think there was a song like that this is suggesting that we're not taught to hate we're born to hate I think that we are built at the you know to at the drop of a hat create us and them and that's and and that's why we're not that moral we have we have an initial moral sense that that is in some ways very impressive and in some ways uh really depressing that we see some of the worst biases in adults reflected in the minds and in the behaviors of young babies but Bloom says understanding our earliest instincts can help if you want to eradicate racism for instance you really are going to want to know to what extent are babies little bigots to what extent is racism a natural part of humanity sounds to me like the experiment show they are little bigots I think to some extent a bias to favor the self where the self could be people who look like me people who act like me people the same taste as me is a very strong human bias it is what one would expect from a creature like us who evolv through natural selection but it has terrible consequences he says it makes sense that Evolution would predispose us to be wary of the other for survival and so we need society and parental nurturing to intervene he showed us one last series of experiments being done in his lab not with babies but with older children of different ages the kids get to decide how many tokens they'll get versus how many will go to another child they're told will come in later I love coin they're told the tokens can be traded in for prizes so you can say green and if you say green then you get this one and the other girl doesn't get any or you can say blue and if you say blue then you get these two and the other girl gets these two so green green the youngest kids in the study will routinely choose to get fewer prizes for themselves just to get more than the other kid I'll pick Green in some cases a lot more youngest children studies art obsessed with social comparison so you get S she doesn't get any yay they don't care about fairness what they want is they want relatively more but a funny thing happens is kids get older green around 8 they start choosing the equal Fair option more and more and by 9 or 10 we saw kids doing something really crazy green deliberately giving the other kid more green or blue green they become generous chalk one up to society they've already been educated they've been educated they've been enculturated they um they have their heads stuffed full of the virtues that we might want to have their heads stuff with culture and education so we can learn to temper some of those nasty Tendencies were're wired for the selfishness the bias but he says the instinct is still there when when we have these findings with the kids the kids who choose this and not this who do you like the kids in baby studies who favor the one who's similar to them the same taste and everything none of this goes away I think as adults we could always see these and kind of not not it's still in us we're fighting it and the truth is when we're under pressure when when life is difficult we regress to our younger selves and all of this elaborate stuff we have on top disappears but of course adversity can bring out the best in us too heroism selfless sacrifice for strangers all of which may have its roots right here great kindness great Aldis a magnificent sense of impartial Justice have their seeds in the baby's mind both aspects of us the good and the bad are the product I think of biological evolution so it seems we're left where we all began with a mix of altruism selfishness Justice bigotry kindness who is a lot more than any of us expected to discover in a blob well I end my conversation with you with far more respect for babies who knew