Showing–not just telling–how babies know right from wrong
[Via Knight Science Journalism Tracker]
Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, has an interesting article in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about morality in babies–how experimenters are demonstrating that babies know right from wrong, in several different contexts.
It’s a very nice example of work by a scientist-writer. Thankfully for those of us who are writers but not scientists, most scientists are not very good at this sort of thing. That’s what keeps us in business. But some are, and Bloom is one of them.
Without taking anything away from Bloom, however, the main reason I’m posting this is because I want to point you to the video that the Times did on its website to accompany the article.
In the piece, Bloom explains how babies tell researchers what they’re thinking by looking longer at something that they like or that is surprising or unexpected. Like me, you might be skeptical of this sort of thing. It’s apparently well established that “looking-time” studies do show important things about what’s going on inside babies’ bald or fuzzy heads, but it seems, well, a little hard to believe.
You might find yourself more willing to believe–indeed, you might find yourself amazed–when you watch the video of babies actually doing this.
It’s a good example of how multimedia content–yikes, where did I get that awful jargon?–I mean, a good example of how a little video on the web can add a lot to the text.
What we have here, in sum, is a very nice story, and an even nicer bit of video.
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The video is a lot of fun to watch. The scenarios they work through are interesting and the kids have such a great time watching. Their attention is fully captured by the puppets.
After seeing a puppet show of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ characters, the infants are giving a choice. They most often choose the ‘good’ character, seemingly indicating a preference for that moral choice.
My scientific concern came from something else shown in the video – the infant is held by their guardian the entire time and the choice is also done in the presence of a researcher who knows the answer. It is a perfect set-up for a Clever Hans situation – either the parent or the researcher can give non-verbal cues to the ‘correct’ choice, just as the smart horse was able to seemingly do quite complex math.
Humans are incredible social creatures and learn early on to watch for subtle cues about proper behavior. The research provides ample opportunities for the infants to be given cues for the right choice, rather than making the right choice themselves.
The way to break the possibility of a Clever Hans scenario is to make sure that the only one who knows the ‘right’ answer is the infant. All the adults must be isolated in ways to prevent them giving away the answer.
Now, the article itself discusses how they do this in order to prevent a Clever Hans situation:
Experimental minutiae: What if babies simply like the color red or prefer squares or something like that? To control for this, half the babies got the yellow square as the helper; half got it as the hinderer. What about problems of unconscious cueing and unconscious bias? To avoid this, at the moment when the two characters were offered on the tray, the parent had his or her eyes closed, and the experimenter holding out the characters and recording the responses hadn’t seen the puppet show, so he or she didn’t know who was the good guy and who the bad guy.
But, in the video there is someone else present – the graduate student, I think – who appears to know the answer because she congratulates the child each time for picking the ‘good’ puppet. She knows the right answer.
The video does not really display the experimental set-up as described in the article and makes me worry about the ease that such bias could be introduced. It negates the entire experimental set-up to have someone who knows the answer present.
Now maybe they altered their procedure for the video, in order to make a more interesting presentation. This is something easily dealt with.
But another aspect of the setup, as described in the article and shown onscreen concerns me much more. There is someone present besides the infant who knows what the right answer is and could transmit that to the infant, even before presentation.
The guardian.
The guardian gets to watch the puppet show and is only asked to close their eyes at presentation. But the cues may already have been given by that point because they are in contact with the infant during the puppet show. All sorts of subtle cues about the puppet show can be communicated because the guardian can see it.
If the guardian spoke during the puppet show and said “That is the good puppet and that is the bad puppet” we would know that cues had been given. But nonverbal cues are the hallmark of Clever Hans and the research protocol as described, and as displayed on video, provides amply opportunity for the guardian to cue the infant during the puppet show.
The guardian should not be able to see the puppet show nor to be able to have any conscious or unconscious way to know what the right choice will be. I’d prefer the setup much more if the guardian was wearing blackout goggle during the puppet show.
I have a natural bias to believe this sort of data. I think that primates have some very strong inborn instincts about right and wrong. I’m just not sure this work, as shown in the video, can help prove that quite yet.
