Just Babies (11 page)

In my view, the psychology of third-party punishment is little more than the psychology of revenge writ large. That
is, we have evolved a tendency to retaliate against those who harm us and who harm the people we love because by doing so we deter such behavior in the future. When we extend these sentiments to cases that we are not directly involved in, it is through the exercise of empathy. We imagine ourselves in the victim’s shoes and respond as if we ourselves were being harmed. Third-party punishment, then, reduces to revenge plus empathy.

This is similar to
Adam Smith’s view: “When we see one man oppressed or injured by another, the sympathy which we feel with the distress of the sufferer seems to serve only to animate our fellow-feeling with his resentment against the offender. We are rejoiced to see him attack his adversary in his turn, and are eager and ready to assist him.” But I think Smith is slightly off base when he says that the perceived resentment of the victim is a necessary spur to punishment. After all, I think that someone who tortures kittens should be punished, but this isn’t because I believe that the kittens themselves would want vengeance. The relevant question isn’t “What does the victim want?” It is “What would
I
want, if it were me or someone I cared about in the position of the victim?”

Consistent with the idea that our appetite for third-party punishment is parasitic on empathy, it varies according to our relationship with the victim and the person harming the victim. We are drawn to punish those who harm individuals that naturally inspire empathy, such as kittens; those whom we care about; and those who are part of our group, tribe, or coalition. We are less motivated to punish
when our empathetic connection is with the aggressor. Few Americans, upon hearing that Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, felt a desire that these men be punished.

Even young children have some appreciation of the logic of third-party punishment, as demonstrated by the psychologists David Pietraszewski and Tamsin German. In their study, researchers told four-year-olds about a child who had pushed another child and taken her toy, then asked who would be mad at the aggressor. The children understood that the victim was likely to be mad, but they also appreciated that a friend of the victim was more likely to be mad than a classmate.

This explanation for third-party punishment—that it stems from our desire for revenge—also explains
some of the odder features of our punitive sentiments. Most notably, people are surprisingly indifferent to the actual consequences of punishment. One study explored people’s judgments about how to penalize a hypothetical company for harms caused by faulty vaccines and birth control pills. Some people were told that a higher fine would make companies try harder to make safer products—a punishment that would improve future welfare. Others were told that a higher fine would likely cause the company to stop making the product, and since there weren’t other good alternatives on the market, the punishment would make the world worse. Most people didn’t care about the negative consequences of the second scenario; they wanted the company fined in both cases. In other words, people are more concerned that punishment should injure the punisher than
that it should make the world a better place. The psychology of revenge is at work here: in Smith’s words,
“He must be made to repent and be sorry for this very action.”

This insensitivity to consequences is typical for desires, which are usually blind to the forces that explain their existence. Sexual desire exists because it leads to baby making, but the psychology of sexual desire is unmoored from any interest in babies. Hunger exists because eating keeps us alive, but this isn’t why we usually want to eat. Similarly, we want to punish, but we don’t think about the purpose of punishment, a point nicely made by, yes, Adam Smith:
“All men, even the most stupid and unthinking, abhor fraud, perfidy, and injustice, and delight to see them punished. But few men have reflected upon the necessity of justice to the existence of society, how obvious soever that necessity may appear to be.”

M
OST
toddlers do not live in a culture of honor. There is usually a Leviathan that will resolve conflicts and punish wrongdoers—such as a parent, babysitter, or teacher. Things do change in middle childhood, when children often find themselves in societies where tattling is discouraged and one is expected to fight one’s own battles. Many middle schools and high schools are much like the Wild West. But two-year-olds are permitted to cry or run away or find an adult when someone smacks them; they aren’t required to retaliate.

This doesn’t mean that children are innocent of retributive desires. They are hardly pacifists, after all.
Young
children are highly aggressive; indeed, if you measure the rate of physical violence through the life span, it peaks at about age two. Families survive the Terrible Twos because toddlers aren’t strong enough to kill with their hands and aren’t capable of using lethal weapons. A two-year-old with the physical capacities of an adult would be terrifying.

Children’s moralizing impulses are sometimes reflected in violence but are also expressed in a more subtle way.
Children tattle. When they see wrongdoing, they are apt to complain about it to an authority figure, and they don’t need to be prompted to do so. In one study, two- and three-year-olds were taught a new game to play with a puppet; when the puppet started to break the rules, the children would spontaneously complain to adults.
In studies of siblings between the ages of two and six, investigators found that most of what the children said to their parents about their brothers or sisters counted as tattling. And their reports tended to be accurate. They were ratting their sibs out, but they were not making things up.

It’s not just siblings who enjoy telling on each other.
The psychologists Gordon Ingram and Jesse Bering explored tattling by children in an inner-city school in Belfast and concluded, “The great majority of children’s talk about their peers’ behavior took the form of descriptions of norm violations.” They noted that it was rare for children to talk to their teachers about something good that someone else had done. As in the sibling study, most of the children’s reports about their peers were true. The children who lied were not the tattlers but the tattlees, who would often deny being
responsible for their acts.
Children also don’t tattle about insignificant things: one study found that three-year-olds will tattle when someone destroys an artwork that someone else made, but not when the individual destroys an artwork that nobody cares about.

Part of the satisfaction of tattling surely comes from showing oneself to adults as a good moral agent, a responsible being who is sensitive to right and wrong. But I would bet that children would tattle even if they could do so only anonymously. Like the strangers who participate in the human flesh search engines, they would do it just to have justice done. The love of tattling reveals an appetite for payback, a pleasure in seeing wrongdoers (particularly those who harmed the child, or a friend of the child) being punished. Tattling is a way of off-loading the potential costs of revenge.

It is hard to tell whether babies also have an appetite for justice. Here is the experiment that I wish we could do to find out: Show a baby a good character and a bad character, using our standard methods (such as having one character help someone up a hill and another block that individual’s path). Then, one at a time, put the good character and the bad character alone on a stage, facing the baby. Next to the baby’s hand is a large red button, and the baby is gently shown how to press on it. When the button is touched, the character will act as though it’s been given an electric shock—it will scream and writhe in pain. How will babies respond to this? Will they snatch their hand back when the good guy screams? Will they continue to press it for the bad
guy? What if it is a difficult button to press—will babies push down on it, their little faces red with exertion, so as to enact just punishment?

I doubt that we will ever do this study. My colleagues, more fastidious than I am, have ethical concerns.

But we have done other studies that offer clues to babies’ punitive motivations. In one study with Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn, and Neha Mahajan,
we did a variant of the good guy/bad guy experiments described in the first chapter. In one scenario, one puppet struggled to open a box, one puppet helped to lift the lid, and another slammed the lid shut. In the other scenario, a puppet rolled a ball to one puppet who rolled it right back, and to another who took the ball and ran away. Instead of asking whether infants preferred to interact with the good or the bad puppet, we asked twenty-one-month-olds either to choose which of the two to reward by giving it a treat or to choose which of the two to punish by taking away a treat. As predicted, we found that when asked to give a treat, they chose the good character; and when asked to take away a treat, they chose the bad one.

One problem with this study, though, is that it was set up so that children were basically forced to choose a puppet to reward and a puppet to punish. We don’t know, then, whether toddlers have an urge to reward and an urge to punish, let alone whether they feel that rewarding and punishing are the right things to do. Also, given the physical demands of rewarding and punishing, we had to use toddlers instead of infants in this study, and they may well have
learned some of the rewarding and punishing behavior from watching other people.

To explore how babies think about reward and punishment at an earlier age, we decided to look at what five- and eight-month-olds thought of other individuals who rewarded and punished. Would they prefer someone who rewarded a good guy to someone who punished a good guy? Would they prefer someone who punished a bad guy over someone who rewarded a bad guy? For each contrast, by adult lights at least, one individual is acting justly and the other is not.

We tested the babies by first showing them the scenarios with the box—one puppet would help open the box; the other would slam it shut. Then we used either the good guy or the bad guy as the main character of an entirely new scene. This time the puppet rolled the ball to two new individuals in turn: one who rolled it back (nice) and the other who ran away with it (mean). We wanted to see which of these two new characters the babies preferred—the one who was nice to the good guy or the one who was mean to the good guy; the one who was nice to the bad guy or the one who was mean to the bad guy.

When the two characters were interacting with the good guy (the one who had helped open the box), babies preferred to reach for the character who was nice to it as opposed to the one who was mean to it—probably because babies tend to prefer nice puppets overall. Indeed, the five-month-olds also preferred to reach for the character who was nice to the bad guy. Either these younger babies weren’t keeping track
of the whole sequence of events, or they just preferred nice puppets, regardless of whom they were interacting with.

But the eight-month-olds were more sophisticated: they preferred the puppet who was mean to the bad guy over the one who was nice to it. So at some point after five months, babies begin to prefer punishers—when the punishment is just.

W
E HAVE
talked so far about certain capacities for judgment and feeling. While perhaps not present in the first few months of life, these capacities are natural in the sense that they are a legacy of our evolutionary history, not cultural inventions.

I have described these capacities throughout as
moral.
This is because they share significant properties with what adults view as moral—they are triggered by acts that affect others’ well-being; they relate to notions such as fairness; they connect to feelings such as empathy and anger; and they are associated with reward and punishment. Also, once toddlers learn enough language to talk about their judgments, they use terms that, for adults, are explicitly moral, such as
nice, mean, fair
, and
unfair.
What first shows up in looking time and preferential reaching in a baby appears later as the topic of moral discourse in a toddler.

Still, the moral life of babies is profoundly limited relative to our own. This was appreciated by the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, who, about fifty years ago, came up with
an influential theory of moral development. He claimed that young children think about morality first in
terms of simpler notions such as self-interest (what’s good is what brings me pleasure) and then in terms of parental authority (what’s good is what my parents say is good). They become more sophisticated as they mature, until, ultimately, morality is understood in terms of abstract rules and principles, similar to the systems developed by moral philosophers. The end point is a consistent and broad theory of right and wrong.

Few contemporary psychologists would endorse Kohlberg’s account. The research we’ve discussed shows that he underestimated the moral sophistication of children. He also overestimated the moral sophistication of adults. Few adults are Kantians or utilitarians or virtue ethicists; we don’t normally think about morality as philosophers do. Rather, we possess what the psychologist David Pizarro has dubbed a
“hodgepodge morality”—“a fairly loose collection of intuitions, rules of thumb, and emotional responses.”

But Kohlberg is right that adult morality is influenced by rational deliberation. This is what separates humans from chimpanzees and separates adults from babies. These other creatures just have sentiments; we have sentiments plus reason. This wouldn’t be so important if our evolved sentiments were perfectly attuned to right and wrong. If our hearts were pure, we wouldn’t need our heads. Unfortunately, our evolved system can be bigoted and parochial and sometimes savagely irrational, and this is what we’ll turn to next.

4

O
THERS

Some people are the world to us, and others hardly matter at all. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “The soul selects its own society / Then shuts the door.” We’ll see that it’s part of our nature to make such distinctions; even babies do it.