When we discuss criminal activity, we often frame the debate in terms of whether people are inherently bad or are born good and turned bad by society. Research from Osaka University might have an answer as they found that young infants are often perfectly capable of both making and then acting on moral judgments, which the researchers believe sheds crucial light on the true origins of morality.

This capability was found to emerge in infants as young as eight months, who were found to punish antisocial behavior seen by a third party. As a result, the researchers believe this motivation to punish poor behavior is likely to be intrinsic rather than something they have learned.

Antisocial behavior

The researchers explain that this willingness and desire to punish antisocial behavior is something that is only really found in humans, but is something that is universal across cultures. Despite this, they say that the development of our moral compass isn’t well understood.

“Morality is an important but mysterious part of what makes us human,” they explain. “We wanted to know whether third-party punishment of antisocial others is present at a very young age, because this would help to signal whether morality is learned.”

The infants recruited for the study were first familiarized with a computer system that displayed various animations on the screen. The display could be controlled using a gaze-tracking system that destroyed objects if they were stared at for a period of time. The children were then shown a video of a geometric agent appearing to hurt another geometric agent, with the aim being to see if the children punished the antisocial geometric agent by staring at it (and thus destroying it).

“The results were surprising,” the researchers say. “We found that preverbal infants chose to punish the antisocial aggressor by increasing their gaze towards the aggressor.”

These findings were then verified in three separate control experiments to ensure that any possible alternative interpretations for the behavior of the children could be excluded.

“The observation of this behavior in very young children indicates that humans may have acquired behavioral tendencies toward moral behavior during the course of evolution,” the researchers conclude. “Specifically, the punishment of antisocial behavior may have evolved as an important element of human cooperation.”