Does growing environment affect moral judgement in pre-verbal infants?


Guide : Prof. Amitabha Mukerjee

Kanishk Varshney {varskann@iitk.ac.in}

Krishna Chandak {kchandak@iitk.ac.in}



Motivation :

Humans judge each other on the moral grounds and prefer those who are morally good, help others with good intentions and punish those doing bad deeds. This quality of moral judgement in innate in us[1] and the criteria for the judgement becomes more and more complex as we grow up, and this intricacy is dependent on various factors such as the environment they grew up in, behaviour and values of people around them, etc.
We, here, are trying to figure out whether this innate characteristic of moral judgement in infants is also affected by the environment they grew up in and if yes, then to which extent?

Related Work :

Previous studies have established that in the first 6 months of life infants start to prefer individuals from their own-race[2] and also based on facial expressions[3]
Hamlin and Kiley have also established that the moral judgement in infants is innate[1]


Experimental setup by Hamlin to demonstrate the Helper vs Hinderer situation


Proposed Methodology :

We would be replicating the experiment by J. Kiley Hamlin with infants from two different growing environments viz., newborns of professors and those of servants, to determine whether there would be some difference between the judgement from the two classes.


References :
  1. Hamlin, Kiley J. (2013) Moral Judgment and Action in Preverbal Infants and Toddlers: Evidence for an Innate Moral Core. Current Directions in Psychological Science June 2013 vol. 22 no. 3 186-193.
  2. Kelley, D. et al. 3-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-racefaces. Dev. Sci. 8, F31–F36 (2005).
  3. Slater, A. et al. Newborn infants prefer attractive faces. Infant Behav. Dev. 21, 345–354 (1998).
  4. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/babies-help-unlock-the-origins-of-morality/.