I think I'm right when I say that we all agree to think that when a baby is born, the only thing in it is innocence. They do not know evil or negative intentions. For them the world is a new place and they often blindly trust their caregivers.
But a new study could prove that this is not the case. I do not mean that babies are not innocent, but that innocence is not as much as we thought when it comes to trusting, knowing and learning to differentiate the intentions of others.
A new study states that Babies may be able to recognize and distinguish a "hero" who tries to help a person, from someone who does nothing since six months of age.
For us as adults, who already know how the world works and that there are people with good intentions and others with bad ones, being able to identify a good Samaritan from someone who is not, can be easy.
We notice this more when we witness an intervention by a third person to protect someone who is being bothered or assaulted, and we automatically relate it to our notions of morality, justice and heroism.
According to another study, children begin to intervene in these acts from the age of three, for example, when a partner bothers another and decides to take action and defend the victim.
However, a specific age was not identified at which they began to notice and distinguish the difference between a person who helps and one who does not. With this new study it was discovered that Babies manage to distinguish good from bad people from six months of age.
To prove this, the researchers created an animation with four elements: a victim, an aggressor, a "friend of justice" and a "witness". The characters consisted of geometric cubes with eyes and different colors.
To the babies who participated in the study they were shown an aggressive interaction between the first two elements and a third one participating in two possible ways: as a "friend of justice", intervening to defend the one who was being disturbed or as a "witness", staying out of the situation and seeing everything without intervening.
After showing the video to the 132 six- and ten-month-old babies, the researchers placed geometric figures equal to those in the video in front of the babies. The "friend of justice" and the "witness" were shown.
In one of the tests, 17 of the 20 6-month-old babies preferred the "justice friend" who took part and intervened to defend who was being molested, while only three of them chose the one who acted as a "witness" and did nothing to stop the violent incident.
They continued to show videos to babies with different interactions and the researchers concluded that the babies chose the "friend of justice" not because they prefer their color, but because they understood that the hero was defending the victim from the aggressor.
The researchers now think that Babies are born with an intrinsic sense of knowing what is right and what is wrong. So now that we know this, we must keep in mind that children learn by example, and although this sense of justice already comes in them, it is in us that they continue to be trained as people of good.
