Authors: Paul Bloom
21
a baby’s “naive physics”:
See, for example, R. Baillargeon, “Object Permanence in 3½ and 4½ Month Old Infants,”
Developmental Psychology
23 (1987): 655–64; E. Spelke, “Principles of Object Perception,”
Cognitive Science
14 (1990): 29–56. For a review, see E. S. Spelke and K. D. Kinzler, “Core Knowledge,”
Developmental Science
10 (2007): 89–96.
22
babies can also do rudimentary math:
K. Wynn, “Addition and
Subtraction by Human Infants,”
Nature
358 (1992): 749–50. For a review of extensions and replications, see K. van Marle and K. Wynn, “Quantitative Reasoning,” in
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science
, ed. Lynn Nadel (London: Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan, 2002). For a study of babies’ understanding of ratios, see K. McCrink and K. Wynn, “Ratio Abstraction by 6-Month-Old Infants,”
Psychological Science
18 (2007): 740–46.
23
They like the sound of human voices … they like the look of human faces:
For review, see Paul Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2004).
24
how to freak out a baby:
E. Tronick, H. Als, L. Adamson, S. Wise, and T. B. Brazelton, “The Infant’s Response to Entrapment Between Contradictory Messages in Face-to-Face Interaction,”
Journal of American Academy of Child Psychiatry
17 (1978): 1–13.
25
In one study:
T. Field, N. Vega-Lahar, F. Scafidi, and S. Goldstein, “Effects of Maternal Unavailability on Mother-Infant Interactions,”
Infant Behavior and Development
9 (1986): 473–78; Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, and Brazelton, “Infant’s Response to Entrapment.”
26
babies know that individuals have goals:
A. Woodward, “Infants Selectively Encode the Goal of an Actor’s Reach,”
Cognition
69 (1998): 1–34.
27
fifteen-month-olds:
K. H. Onishi and R. Baillargeon, “Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?,”
Science
308 (2005): 255–58.
28
previous work by the psychologists David Premack and Ann Premack:
D. Premack and A. J. Premack, “Infants Attribute Value +/- to the Goal-Directed Actions of Self-Propelled Objects,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
9 (1997): 848–56.
29
we created animations in which geometrical figures helped or hindered one another:
V. Kuhlmeier, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Attribution of Dispositional States by 9-Month-Olds: The Role of Faces,” under review; V. Kuhlmeier, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Attribution of Dispositional States by 12-Month-Old Infants,”
Psychological Science
14 (2003): 402–8; J. K. Hamlin, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants,”
Nature
450 (2007): 557–59. To see examples of what the babies are shown, go
to “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants,” 2007,
www.yale.edu/infantlab/socialevaluation/Helper-Hinderer.html
.
30
Our first set of studies used … puppets instead of animations:
Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom, “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants.”
31
We then followed this up with a pair of studies looking at three-month-olds:
J. K. Hamlin, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “3-Month-Olds Show a Negativity Bias in Social Evaluation,”
Developmental Science
13 (2010): 923–39.
32
a “negativity bias”:
A. Vaish, T. Grossmann, and A. Woodward, “Not All Emotions Are Created Equal: The Negativity Bias in Social-Emotional Development,”
Psychological Bulletin
134 (2008): 383–403; P. Rozin and E. Royzman, “Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion,”
Personality and Social Psychology Review
5 (2001): 296–320.
33
a project led by Mariko Yamaguchi:
M. Yamaguchi, V. Kuhlmeier, K. Wynn, and K. van Marle, “Continuity in Social Cognition from Infancy to Childhood,”
Developmental Science
12 (2009): 746–52.
34
Kiley and Karen created different sets of morality plays:
J. K. Hamlin and K. Wynn, “Five- and 9-Month-Old Infants Prefer Prosocial to Antisocial Others,”
Cognitive Development
26 (2011): 30–39.
35
identifying the helper as nice and the hinderer as mean:
J. K. Hamlin, K. Wynn, and P. Bloom, “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants,” poster presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, 2007.
36
Adam Smith … describes the moral sense:
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 222.
2. EMPATHY AND COMPASSION
1
some unhappy combination of genes, parenting, and idiosyncratic personal experience:
E. Viding, R. J. R. Blair, T. E. Moffitt, and R. Plomin, “Evidence for Substantial Genetic Risk for Psychopathy in 7-Year-Olds,”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
46 (2005): 592–97.
2
a strategy that parents often use with their children:
Martin L. Hoffman,
Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3
a thirteen-year-old mugger:
William Damon,
The Social World of the Child
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977), 18.
4
Ted Bundy was puzzled:
Quoted in Paul Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human
(New York: Basic Books, 2004).
5
The serial killer Gary Gilmore summed up the attitude:
Quoted in Bloom,
Descartes’ Baby.
6
interview with Peter Woodcock:
From Jon Ronson,
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
(New York: Riverhead, 2011), 91.
7
Some illustrative examples are reported by Charles Darwin:
Charles Darwin, “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,”
Mind
2 (1877): 285–94.
8
William responded to the perceived suffering of others:
Darwin, “Biographical Sketch,” 289.
9
William’s satisfaction at his own kind actions:
Darwin, “Biographical Sketch,” 291.
10
first hints of guilt and shame:
Darwin, “Biographical Sketch,” 292.
11
“carefully planned deceit”:
Darwin, “Biographical Sketch,” 292.
12
“How much money would it take for you to strangle a cat …?”:
Michael Sandel,
Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).
13
psychopathy can be an asset in business and politics:
Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare,
Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006).
14
“the look people get right before I stab them”:
A. A. Marsh and E. M. Cardinale, “Psychopathy and Fear: Specific Impairments in Judging Behaviors That Frighten Others,”
Emotion
12 (2012): 892–98.
15
Adam Smith didn’t use the word
empathy
… but he described it well:
Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759; repr., Lawrence, KS: Digireads.com, 2011), 13.
16
“my own throat would feel narrow in sympathy”:
John Updike,
Getting the Words Out
(Northridge, CA: Lord John Press, 1988),
17, cited in Elaine Hatfield, John T. Cacioppo, and Richard L. Rapson,
Emotional Contagion
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
17
Adam Smith provides another example:
Smith,
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, 13.
18
mirror neurons:
V. Gallese, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, and G. Rizzolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,”
Brain
119 (1996): 593–609; G. Di Pellegrino, L. Fadiga, L. Fogassi, V. Gallese, and G. Rizzolatti, “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,”
Experimental Brain Research
91 (1992): 176–80.
19
comparing it to the discovery of DNA:
V. S. Ramachandran, “Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind ‘the Great Leap Forward’ in Human Evolution,” 2009, Edge video, transcript at
www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_index.html
.
20
the initial claims about mirror neurons are significantly overblown:
G. Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans,”
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
21 (2009): 1229–43; Steven Pinker,
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
(New York: Viking, 2011); Alison Gopnik, “Cells That Read Minds? What the Myth of Mirror Neurons Gets Wrong About the Human Brain,”
Slate
, April 2007,
www.slate.com/articles/life/brains/2007/04/cells_that_read_minds.html
.
21
empathy exists to motivate compassion and altruism:
For discussion, see C. Daniel Batson,
Altruism in Humans
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a review of empathy and sympathy from a developmental perspective, see Hoffman,
Empathy and Moral Development.
22
the link between empathy … is more nuanced than many people believe:
See also J. Prinz, “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?,” in
Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives
, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
23
Empathy is also influenced by what one thinks of the other person:
T. Singer, B. Seymour, J. P. O’Doherty, K. E. Stephan, R. J. Dolan, and C. D. Frith, “Empathic Neural Responses Are Modulated by the Perceived Fairness of Others,”
Nature
439 (2006): 466–69.
24
an example from the philosopher Peter Singer of an obviously good act:
P. Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs
1 (1972): 229–43.
25
the Chinese scholar Mencius:
Quoted in S. Darwall, “Empathy, Sympathy, Care,”
Philosophical Studies
89 (1998): 261–82.
26
Steven Pinker points out:
Pinker,
Better Angels
, 576.
27
A real-world case, described by the philosopher Jonathan Glover:
Jonathan Glover,
Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 379–80.
28
Experiments by the psychologist C. Daniel Batson:
C. D. Batson, T. R. Klein, L. Highberger, and L. L. Shaw, “Immorality from Empathy-Induced Altruism: When Compassion and Justice Conflict,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
68 (1995): 1042–54.
29
Even newborns respond to other people’s expressions:
A. N. Meltzoff and M. K. Moore, “Imitations of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates,”
Science
198 (1977): 75–78.
30
parents and babies frequently mirror one another’s expressions:
C. Trevarthen, “The Concept and Foundations of Infant Intersubjectivity,” in
Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny
, ed. Stein Bråten (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 15–46.
31
the sound of crying is unpleasant for babies; it tends to make them cry themselves:
A. Sagi and M. Hoffman, “Empathic Distress in the Newborn,”
Developmental Psychology
12 (1976): 175–76.
32
Babies cry more at the sound of another baby’s cry … the cries of a chimpanzee infant:
G. B. Martin and R. D. Clark, “Distress Crying in Infants: Species and Peer Specificity,”
Developmental Psychology
18 (1982): 3–9; M. Dondi, F. Simion, and G. Caltran, “Can Newborns Discriminate Between Their Own Cry and the Cry of Another Newborn Infant?,”
Developmental Psychology
35 (1999): 418–26.