Before you play the video, ask yourself at what age you think children start making moral judgements about the people around them.

 

Then check your answer by watching this engaging 4+ minute video.

Dr. Kiley Hamlin dedicated her life's research, ultimately obtaining her PhD at Yale to answer that question.

She wanted to know what infants understand, if anything, about the social world, and in particular, a really important aspect of the social world, and that is the moral world. So individuals and actions that are good versus bad, what we will call right versus wrong, people being nice to each other versus being jerks to each other. 

The results of her research are likely to surprise you as only about 1 out of 100 guess the correct answer to the question posed above. 

There's many more gifts of life-changing science in our free course "Parenting in a Crisis."

In this study, a little circle character, we call him the climber, he tries but fails to climb up a steep hill a number of times, so he keeps moving about halfway up the hill and then falling back to the bottom and then moving halfway up the hill again, and falling back down, the climber is helped by the in this case, blue character becomes and just bumps him up from the bottom, allowing him to reach the top allowing him to reach his goal. On other events, the climber tries and fails to get up the hill. This time the climber is harmed or hindered in his goal, in this case by a yellow character who comes and bumps him down to the bottom of the hill. Overall, we wonder whether babies will, on average prefer helping characters to harming characters.