At the age of six months, babies can barely sit up — let alone take their first tottering steps, crawl or talk. But, according to psychologists, they have already developed a sense of moral code and can tell the difference between good and evil.
An astonishing series of experiments is challenging the views of many psychologists and social scientists that human beings are born as “blank slates” — and that our morality is shaped by our parents, environment and experiences.
In a study on six- to twelve-month-olds, children observe a circle moving up a hill. A nice triangle helps push it. A mean square blocks it.
After the station, toddlers can reach for a triangle or a square. Most of them decide to go for the triangle.
Do infants prefer nice creatures or avoid mean ones?
Both.
Nice triangles were preferred to neutral shapes, neutral shapes were preferred to mean squares.
A child looks at dolls, one good and one bad (share or not).
Then the child is presented with the dolls, each sitting on a pile of candy. Who should lose a piece of candy? The bad doll. Who wins a piece of candy? The good puppet. It is remarkable that toddlers even assess a secondary punishment.
The good and the bad puppet then interact with two other puppets who can be nice or bad. And who did the children prefer from these second layer dolls? Those who were nice to the nice dolls and those who punished the bad dolls.
In another experiment Capuchin Monkeys were trained to do one task: A human gives them a small, uninteresting object — a pebble.
The human then extends his hand palm up, a gesture capuchin monkeys use to beg.
If the monkey puts the pebble in his hand, there is a food reward or in other words, the animals have learned how to buy food.
Now two capuchin monkeys stand next to each other. Each gets a pebble. Each gives it to the human. Each gets a grape, very rewarding.
Now things change.
Both monkeys pay their pebble.
Monkey 1 gets a grape.
But monkey 2 gets a cucumber, which is poor compared to grapes — capuchins prefer grapes to cucumbers 90 percent of the time.
Monkey 2 was disadvantaged.
Usually, monkey 2 then throws the cucumber at the human or lashes out in frustration.
It is very interesting to see that monkeys have a sense of fairness as well as negative or positive emotions/reactions depending on the outcome.
If you look at history, you inevitably come across dictators and genocides.
Take the Rwanda genocide for example which refers to extensive acts of violence in Rwanda that began on April 7, 1994 and lasted until mid-July 1994.
They cost the lives of approximately 800,000 to 1,000,000 people.
In nearly 100 days, members of the Hutu majority killed approximately 75 percent of the Tutsi minority living in Rwanda, as well as Hutu who did not participate in the genocide or actively opposed it.
Initially, the assassination of President Habyarimana in his plane by the Hutu militia triggered the genocide.
The concentration of murders was 5x higher than in Nazi Germany at peak times but in contrast to organized concentration camps, it was neighbors who came at you with bludgeons, raped, mutilated, tortured and cruelly killed Tutsi.
Do we have a basic affinity for violence?
In most cases, when a watermelon is dropped or a traffic accident is about to occur, we seldom turn these events the cold shoulder. They excite us even though something horrible could potentially happen. Now, this doesn’t incline that we are generally harmful creatures of course.
In the third Reich, the police slogans ordered to kill and extradite Jews but you could refuse without feeling “crass” consequences.
These people acted of their own free will, under certain pressure and brainwashing, but in the end, it was their decision to do so.
The historian Norman Naimark took a closer look at a concentration camp named Lublin Majdanek.
There, even among the victims, a hierarchy was formed in which the upper class punished the others, although all were Jews. In absolute emergencies, one probably does everything to survive and to provide for his family and friends. We are naturally inclined to form certain Us/Them structures and do everything to underline the differences.
Concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl tells that even in concentration camps he saw the positive and hopefulness in people.
The same applies to the people in Lublin Majdanek where the women sang songs in the evening and shared food, took care of warmth, etc.
There is also in every human being a will to do good, which, however, can easily be shaken by circumstances.
Murders, famine and rapes are steadily decreasing because people started to think for themselves since the enlightenment epoch and are constantly being educated by better school systems, the internet & globalization. Yet we see increasing conflicts in Russia and Ukraine, North Korea, Afghanistan, Syria, America, anti-Semitic parties gaining popularity and China continues to oppress their people. We aren’t sure what the future looks like but there are problems that have to be tackled in a civilized manner. Most people don’t know but China has up to 65% of the world’s total grain supply and if they decide to stop exporting, things could look different again altogether.
Things are constantly coming to a head and this is all the more dangerous because we are all the more powerful.
Can love regulate all this or are we naturally selfish?
We have a “base layer” of amorality that tells us to survive and reproduce, and this part of our brain (our “reptilian brain”) can make people do terrible things for selfish reasons. However, we also have a higher conscience that makes people “good” and tells us to ignore our instinctive minds.
We are neither inherently good nor evil. Few people are truly immoral (i.e., they try to do bad things for the sake of doing bad things), but many of us allow our reptilian brain to take over.
Remember Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State University football coach who was a cruel serial child molester.
After his conviction, an opinion piece appeared on CNN. Under the provocative headline “Do pedophiles deserve pity?” wrote James Cantor of the University of Toronto, gave an overview of the neurobiology of pedophilia.
For example, it occurs in families, suggesting that genes play a role.
Pedophiles have atypically high rates of childhood brain injury.
There is evidence of endocrine abnormalities during fetal life.
Does this raise the possibility that the neurobiological stage is set for some people to be that way? Precisely.
Cantor concludes, “You can’t choose not to be a pedophile.” That’s bold and right. And then Cantor makes a startling long leap regarding mitigated free will. Does any of this biology mitigate the condemnation and punishment Sandusky deserved? No.
“You can’t choose to be a pedophile, but you can choose not to be a child molester.”
Things are never that black and white. Here are just a few of the things that can affect us according to neuroscientist and author Robert Sapolsky:
Blood sugar levels; the socioeconomic status of your birth family; a concussion; sleep quality and quantity; prenatal environment; stress and glucocorticoid levels; whether you have pain; whether you have Parkinson’s disease and what medications you were prescribed; perinatal hypoxia; your dopamine D4 receptor gene variant; whether you had a stroke in the frontal cortex; whether you were abused in childhood; how high your cognitive load was in the last few minutes; your MAO-A gene variant; whether you are infected with a particular parasite; whether you have the gene for Huntington’s disease; the lead concentration in your tap water when you were a child; whether you live in an individualistic or a collectivistic culture; whether you are a heterosexual male and there is an attractive woman nearby; whether you have smelled someone’s sweat fear. And so on.
What makes a person good is how much they nurture their higher conscience.
If more than a handful of people really wanted to destroy society, they might succeed. What amazes me is not how evil we are, but how civilized we are, even though there are billions of us on the planet. Our civil society is largely an illusion. It functions only because we have all (tacitly) agreed to keep up appearances. The police have no powers other than those we have given them as a society.
—
Subscribe to my newsletter to receive similar content directly to your inbox.
I sincerely hope my posts impacted your life in positive ways!
https://robinklose.medium.com/subscribe
Since I don’t get paid by Medium directly, it would mean the world to me if you could check out https://ko-fi.com/robink1 and maybe even buy me a coffee with a small tip!
Every amount is greatly appreciated, especially if you leave a kind note at the end :)
