At the age of six months, most babies have barely learnt to sit up, let alone crawl, walk or talk. But, according to new research, they can already assess someone's intentions towards them, deciding who is a likely friend or enemy. US scientists believe babies acquire the ability to make social evaluations in the first few months of life. It may provide the foundation for moral thoughts and actions in later years, they write in the journal Nature. "By six months, babies have learnt quite a lot and they are taking things in," said Kiley Hamlin, lead author of the research. "We can't say that it is hard-wired (exists in a newborn baby) but we can say it is pre-linguistic and pre-explicit teaching," she told BBC News. "We don't think this says that babies have any morality but it does seem an essential piece of morality to feel positive about those who do good things and negative about those who do bad things - it seems like an important piece of a later more rational and moral system." Infant lab tests: Like all social creatures, humans are able to make rapid judgements of other people based on how they behave towards others. But the roots of this behaviour and when it develops are not well understood. The experiment Kiley Hamlin and colleagues at Yale University devised experiments to test whether babies aged six and 10 months were able to evaluate the behaviour of others. They used wooden toys of different shapes that were designed to appeal to babies.
The babies were sat on their parents' laps and shown a display representing a character trying to climb a hill. The climbing character, which had eyes to make it human-like, was either knocked down the hill by an unhelpful character (a toy of a different shape and colour) or pushed up the hill by a helper cartoon figure (another shape and colour). After watching the "puppet show" several times, each baby was presented with the helper and hinderer toys and asked to pick one.
