Do babies have a moral compass?

An experiment five years ago suggested that babies are equipped with an innate moral compass, which drives them to choose good individuals over the bad in a wooden puppet show. But new research casts doubt on those findings, demonstrating that a baby’s apparent preference for what’s right might just reflect a fondness for bouncy things. …

But researchers in New Zealand, who reviewed videos of the Yale experiments, say they noticed two other factors that could have driven the infants’ choices. …

“For example, when we had the climber bounce at the bottom of the hill, but not at the top of the hill, infants preferred the hinderer, that is, the one that pushed the climber down the hill,” Scarf explained. “If the social evaluation hypothesis was correct, we should have seen a clear preference for the helper, irrespective of the location of the bounce, because the helper always helped the climber achieve its goal of reaching the top of the hill.”