2024-02-08 00:55:43
Babies understand what is right and wrong much earlier than previously thought – this is shown by a new study by scientists from Regensburg and Oxford, which was announced last Wednesday. “We were able to demonstrate for the first time that infants already know in their first year of life that they should behave the way others in a group do,” explained the first author of the study, Regensburg psychology professor Moritz Köster. “This was also the case when the group was shown a completely new action that the little ones had only been able to observe twice before.”
How did the researchers figure this out? According to the information, they showed the babies two short films. In it, two little men hit two balls together. A third comes into the scene and does the same thing or does something completely different, throwing the balls up in the air. If the third male wanted to join the other two males, they would either react in a friendly manner and accept him. Or they turned away from him.
Understand rules before you can execute them yourself
To check whether the infants were surprised, the scientists measured their pupil size. According to this, babies showed dilatation as early as eleven months old if the group’s reaction was not consistent. So if, for example, conforming behavior with the group still led to exclusion from it.
“A very important feature of social norms is that we not only behave the way others do, as many animal species do with their completely natural behavior, but that we also evaluate others based on whether they follow the rules or not,” explained Köster. “It is remarkable that babies understand this before they can express the rules themselves or competently carry out the actions shown.”
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The psychologist suspects that there is “a very basic human process behind this, a social compass so to speak, which allows even infants to organize their social environment and find their way in it.”
According to a statement from the University of Regensburg, the study was published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.
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