Connecting the dots on the origins of social knowledge

Arber Tasimi
in press, Perspectives on Psychological Science

Abstract

Understanding what infants know about social life is a growing enterprise. Indeed, one of the most exciting developments within psychological science over the past decade is the view that infants may come equipped with knowledge about “good” and “bad,” and about “us” and “them.” At the heart of this view is a seminal set of studies indicating that infants prefer helpers to hinderers and similar to dissimilar others. What a growing number of researchers now believe is that these preferences may be based on innate (i.e., unlearned) social knowledge. Here I consider how decades of research in developmental psychology can lead to a different way to make sense of this popular body of work. As I make connections between old observations and new theorizing––and between classic findings and contemporary research––I consider how the same preferences that are thought to emanate from innate social knowledge may, instead, reflect social knowledge that infants can rapidly build as they pursue relationships with their caregivers.  I offer this perspective with hopes that it will inspire future work that supports or questions the ideas sketched out here and, by doing so, will broaden an understanding of the origins of social knowledge.

The paper is here.

Is Morality Innate?

By Jesse J. Prinz
Forthcoming in W. Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology. Oxford University Press

Here is an excerpt:

The link between morality and human nature has been a common theme since ancient times, and, with the rise of modern empirical moral psychology, it remains equally popular today. Evolutionary ethicists, ethologists, developmental psychologists, social neuroscientists, and even some cultural
anthropologists tend to agree that morality is part of the bioprogram (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; de Waal, 1996; Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Hauser, 2006; Ruse, 1991; Sober & Wilson, 1998; Turiel, 2002). Recently, researchers have begun to look for moral modules in the brain, and they have been increasingly tempted to speculate about the moral acquisition device, and innate faculty for norm acquisition akin to celebrated language acquisition device, promulgated by Chomsky (Dwyer, 1999; Mikhail, 2000; Hauser, this volume). All this talk of modules and mechanism may make some shudder, especially if they recall that eugenics emerged out of an effort to find the biological sources of evil. Yet the tendency to postulate an innate moral faculty is almost irresistible. For one thing, it makes us appear nobler as a species, and for another, it offers an explanation of the fact that people in every corner of the globe seem to have moral rules. Moral nativism is, in this respect, an optimistic doctrine—one that makes our great big world seem comfortingly smaller.

The chapter is here.

Moral Judgment and Action in Preverbal Infants and Toddlers: Evidence for an Innate Moral Core

By J. Kiley Hamlin
Current Directions in Psychological Science 22(3) 186 –193
DOI: 10.1177/0963721412470687

Abstract

Although developmental psychologists traditionally explore morality from a learning and development perspective, some aspects of the human moral sense may be built-in, having evolved to sustain collective action and cooperation as required for successful group living. In this article, I review a recent body of research with infants and toddlers, demonstrating surprisingly sophisticated and flexible moral behavior and evaluation in a preverbal population whose opportunity for moral learning is limited at best. Although this work itself is in its infancy, it supports theoretical claims that human morality is a core aspect of human nature.

The entire article is here.