Nature vs Nurture: Are babies born mean or bigoted?

I'm not really partial to any of your answers.

Babies may naturally be born with an instinct to fear what is unfamiliar and unknown, but that doesn't mean they're bigoted. Children have inclinations, but for good or bad, it takes nurturing to make them solidify.

Also, the moment we start aborting babies because of tests that suggest a child might be "a bad person", we've truly gone down an even darker path than we're already on. Aborting babies just for possibly being disabled, having birth differences, or having an undesired sex is bad enough as it is, but possibly aborting babies due to some theory that something suggests a baby will be bad is just twisted.

Hopefully being deemed "a good person" is never a requirement for the birth of any child.

As long as the parents do their jobs, and raise them the best they can. Hopefully they never turnout like these violent people, and usually it starts because they had no guidance growing up.

is it nurture when religion is rammed down a child's throat at the earliest point possible?

It's hard to have puppet shows with a fetus as your audience. This thread and subject has absolutely nothing to do with abortion, nor could it. Watch the video.

Thats for sure but I do not agree with the rest. Why would you let a child which for example has a very short lifetime expectation being born ? It will be suffering for both parents and child.

How could it not? You think people haven't been trying to figure out whether there's a genetic predisposition for some children to turn out bad and others to turn out good? If "nature" defines that aspect of someone, it stands to reason that science will be able to show that influence, and in that case, why wouldn't there be some people in favor of killing said "bad people" when they're young or stopping them before they are born?

When it comes to the question "Are babies born mean or bigoted?" and "Nature vs Nurture", if babies can be shown to be born mean or bigoted, wouldn't it be believed by some that these children be stopped before they mature into their eventual bigoted selves? I know that may seem too sci-fi at this point, but with people already intent on changing baby's genetic material to get more favorable features or aborting them to avoid some detected aspects of them, it isn't too far-fetched to consider that people might also take into account and hope to either genetically change or abort a child that may be born mean or bigoted.

I appreciate the little video, but this is what comes to mind when that question of "nature vs nurture" is brought up.

"This video is not available in your country. Learn more."

How about you learn more about how the internet works.

Dear Internet Border Patrol, meet Mr. Proxy.

That said, I would like to think the brains of babies are similar to blank paper. That they get shaped and manipulated into what they are thanks to the culture in which they are raised and the circumstances in which they grow up. But the thing dudeglove posted could also make sense - after all we are social creatures and it would make sense to have a base understanding of things that aid us/secure our survival. But I don't see how the brain could develop that "knowing" at such an early stage. Because what does that even mean? If our brain comes with what some kind of pre-installed software, we could potentially change what that stuff is.

Of course there has. There have been articles about things like "the bad gene" wherein people try to explain away "evil" as a genetic thing. The step from that to "opposing current political leadership is a genetic dysfunction so we have to put you down" isn't exactly far off either...

there is no choice in this matter. the beliefs of parents are going to condition the children no matter what. an atheist parent will corrupt their children with these things as well as religious ones would.

oh god not this psychology shit, the mandatory lessons of it drove me insane with boredom.

Again, not what this thread is about. If you want to discuss abortion, please do it in another thread. This thread is about babies who have been born.

Well, being born disabled or different doesn't necessarily mean a child will have a significantly shorter life or simply a life of suffering. There are some situations where a birth defect may be found that could lead to little to no life, and in those cases, it's understandable if a parent may want to prevent that suffering. What I was more specifically referencing is the ever-increasing rate of ending pregnancies based on the mere possibility of a child being disabled regardless of evidence that they will not be able to live at all. There's an issue of severity, with a lot of people mainly interpreting a diagnosis as the worst of the worst case scenario that needs to be ended. The rate of abortions for those found to have birth abnormalities such as spina bifida or down syndrome are extremely high(above 90%), despite the fact that a majority of children born with varying degrees of these conditions live relatively long and decent lives. It's a concerning matter of maintaining disabled individuals as undesired in society despite the vast and often unique impacts they regularly have on those around them.

Though, that was just a side note referencing the growing criteria many people use for ending pregnancies. I don't mean to go off on something else about disabled and different individuals. I think the discussion is on nature vs nurture on whether babies can be born bad or good, and it's probably best if we focus on that. :)

Tabula rasa

Exactly. Unfortunately, as much as SpaceInsomniac may want to an obviously thorny subject(despite bringing up the already tumultuous topic of nature vs nurture), it is all too related to the modern conversation of nature vs nurture and whether people can be born bad or good. Because if they can be born bad or good, people will likely attempt to prevent the "bad" from being born.

How about that Rogue Legacy? - what a great game. Oh and OP? - maybe find a site thats more up your alley, like dull and tedious.com.

I can't tell and frankly, I don't think there's a way to tell one way or another. The number and degree of influences a child encounters in her/his life makes it very difficult or nearly impossible to determine what was the child's original nature like. Do children even born with any kind of understanding to distinguish right from wrong or is it something they learn from their surrounding? I don't know. But again, I'm an idiot so no surprises there.

Talking about being good or evil, check this show out: Psycho-Pass

I wanted to vote for a combination of nature and nurture =(

Indeed. Won't go too far into it but like, at that point you also end up dealing with "what is bad" and "what is good". Who thinks one thing is bad and another good? What if the block that was mentioned earlier would explode and the "evil" shape (or was it puppet? I forget already.) was just trying to push it back to protect its little shape-children from being blown to less definable shapes? Is it still evil for not helping the other shape? Would the kids understand this nuance?

Can a kid be born with the predisposition for murdering others? Heck, even if it IS genetic, is that a bad trait? I mean, if your tribe is under attack by another and you have no genetic trait in you that says "it's okay to kill in some circumstances" you're gonna be pretty fucked, right?

So I dunno. I'd say if they are born able to distinguish between "good and bad" that would be extremely limited to things that are "good" in the sense that it serves nothing but the most basic of survival instincts. Because nothing else would make much sense.

I'd maybe say all kids are born Chaotic Good? They're not born mean or bigoted, they just have the capability to be mean and bigoted when it's necessary for their own survival, or the survival of others?

I always found the whole nature vs nurture debate kind of weird. Surely it's a combination of the two. We are all born with human instincts which affect our behavior as much as our upbringing and culture do.

I believe it's a learned behaviour. Much in the way of every other behaviour. There is a need that needs to be filled, and malice fills it.

I think people are born with selfpreserving instinct, but all that we define as "good" in society are obscure rules that they need to learn.

If children can be born addicted to mind altering chemicals, I'd say there's a sliver of a chance. The fact some children are born with fatal diseases, and explained to at a very early age they are going to die soon but still remain positive tends to cast off all other doubt.

This is quite interesting, but suffers from the flaw that nearly all research done with babies has which is a very wide scope for interpretation. For example, they use the babies preference for punishment puppet as evidence for their sense of justice which trumps the possibility that yellow triangles are just irresistible to babies. But it seems at least marginally possible to me that they associate a figure with the power of judgment with the figure of their mother and that is why the prefer it. It also seems totally mistaken to connect this to transcendental concepts like justice and goodness when self interest seems like the more rational conclusion: of course we might prefer the one who helps us, or makes sure that others won't hinder us. If you'd never heard of Adam Smith that might make it seem incompatible with western moral values, I suppose.

These aren't my real issues with the article though. The real problem is that it's logic is totally circular, ultimately. Namely it says that our notion of justice is x and babies display evidence of agreement or conformity to x, without paying attention to the fact that if the latter statement is true then the former statement cannot help but be true. Also it kind of undercuts itself by telling us that the intensity of the negative reactions to the bad characters increases with time, which seems more indicative of learned behaviour to me (or, I suppose, just increasing motor-skills).

Sorry, I realise that I'm being absurdly critical of an article written for a comedy website. As to the question of the thread, which was about whether you think babies are born bigoted. For my part, I feel like what we think of as bigoted can't be (entirely) a hardwired thing because it would require an inbuilt knowledge of a bunch of concepts which it just doesn't make sense (to me) to believe are hardwired - the existence of different skin colours, sexual orientations and so on. However I do think it's eminently possible that (as someone else said) there might be genes that give you a predisposition to fear of the unknown which might cause you to be bigoted (or variety of other factors in concert with it, also - being predisposed to anger, having an overactive need for acceptance and a heightened fear of the unknown/different might lead a recently unemployed person to join an anti-immigration group). However, even if this is the case, I don't think that is evidence to say that the child is born bigoted - in this case the possibility might be managed by the mere expedient of making sure that those things that are traditionally targets for bigotry are not "unknown" quantities to the person in question.

Morality is non-existent in nature thus an individual opinion about whether or not what he is doing is moral or amoral is purely nurture because morality itself is nurtured by human. The way and individual or a collective determines if an action of another individual or collective is moral or amoral is once again, purely nurture.

When we refer to "good" and "bad" we generally refer to our own nurtured opinion of good and bad. A baby, and any animal to be precise, is born on the "bad" side of the moral scale simply because what we consider "good" is what is similar to the model of our society. And most of the times a baby will be less accustomed with social norms than an adult that has been nurtured in said norms, of course there are outliers that once nurtured by society chose to ignore it's rules.

So let me put it in terms of RPG morality: there is lawful; neutral and chaotic

A lawful individual is an individual that goes outside his duties to respect social norm and thus is good in the eyes of most individuals of a society, a neutral individual respects social norms and upholds them where he needs to do so and thus is nor good nor bad and a chaotic person is someone who doesn't know or by choice doesn't respect any social norm thus he is bad.

Most people are somewhere in between, the only way you can be at the very bottom is by not making contact with society.

Thus a baby new born becomes less "bad" more "good" with each passing day because he gets more and more accustomed to society.

Of course we don't see a bay as an evil being because he has no power to act, but had a baby been born with power equal to all existing humanity and completely ignoring of social norms i guarantee he would be considered the devil incarnated by most members of society.

Give 'em some hunka-dunk and they'll mellow out.

Really though, I think there's some omissions about brain growth here that are complicating things. They're suggesting that a baby's brain works a certain way, and then we sort-of "gain" altruism but can regress into some of those bigoted was of reasoning that baby us had. That kind of makes no sense.

Individually, those studies seem legit for humans at those given stages of development, but not for their whole lives. Notice those babies weren't talking. It wasn't that society had to condition them to. It was that they had not developed the parts of their brain necessary to make the complex mouth movements and understand abstract correlations like language. Their brains are literally unfinished and continue being "built" for years after those studies were even done.

You wouldn't try understanding a butterfly's brain by doing tests on a caterpillar, but this is a similar situation. As we age, our brains are formed, and our minds are given context to our innate feelings. We're not creatures trying to be good despite being secret jerks, we're a progression of complicated morals and bias that babies were never capable in the first place.

Thus says dude on the internet, Ph.D

(also, maybe babies just fucking hate blue shirts. get on it science!)

Some babies are fucked up in the head right from the beginning and are born as psychopaths. There are other mental disorders that can prevent someone from functioning normally. I would think that little kids that torture small animals never learned that from their parents.

There was a good show on this on the Science channel, may have been through the wormhole not sure. Humans seem to have a natural tendencies to hate/dislike/avoid people who are different or think differently then they do.

*edit* yeah they did the same tests as this video.

It's a combination of the two, I believe it was 70% nurture 30% nature, or something like that. Numbers might be wrong but yeah its both, but nurture has a higher effect.

video games

I think the concepts of "good" and "evil" are human constructs designed to create order for civilized society. Saying something is good or evil depends on your definitions of those terms in the first place. And that varies from person to person. I think how we react to a lot of things harkens back to our animalistic desire for survival. So by default I think we are blank slates. If racist parents train their children to hate people of other races that is survival instinct kicking in. Humans fear what they dont understand and that many times emanates as hatred. And you will obviously be bigoted an wary of things you fear because again survival instincts.

The only correct answer here is "Of Course Not".

I've had many extensive discussions about the topic, but I'm off of lunch in fourteen minutes so I'll just say this:

A child has never had to learn selfishness. Even in societies without common, defined moral law, basic goodness is taught because logical thinkers, selfish themselves, realize that inherent evil must be managed.

I have several friends who work with remote tribes in Papua New Guinea. These peoples abide by codes of revenge. A corpse in one village requires another corpse in another village, and back and forth it goes. This is not an effect of inherent goodness, but of logical consideration against inherent evil.

Bigotry is a matter of exposure. People fear the unfamiliar.

I'm sure babies can be born dickheads, but bigoted? That's not even possible haha

After reading TruthTellah's post, I gotta say if I'm gonna be pro abortion, which I am, I also have to support aborting babies who are handicapped. The only reason I even support abortion is because I assume it's saving a baby from less than ideal circumstances. Your dipshit 17 year old wigger dad may grow up, but that handicap's never going away.

Coming full circle though, you're never gonna convince me to abort a baby because it may be an asshole haha

Did any of you watch the video? 87% of the babies tested preferred to punish, rather than reward, those who didn't like the same thing that they liked. That's even higher than the number of babies who wanted to see a mean puppet punished.

When you want those who are different than you to be hindered rather than helped, that is bigotry. Assuming that the results of the test are both accurate and reproducible, this study confirms that humans have a natural tendency to not only side with those who are most like us, but to actually want those who are different than us to suffer.

I'd say your wording is off. It's not a matter of "bigotry" or "being mean", it's a matter of selfishness and selflessness. I believe we are naturally selfish and have to learn altruism.

As in everything in life, it's neither one or the other. Rather, it's a combination of both.

I'm curious if you read my above post and how you'd respond because it seems important to me at least to differentiate babies versus humans. We're not just larger versions of babies, our bodies and brains specifically are physically very different. So deriving facts about baby behavior from studies like these is fine, but extrapolating those findings to apply to adults just doesn't really work.

Also, your 60 minutes link has had this running through my head all day. So thanks for that! ;)

(miss you Bryan)

I think everyone is born pretty bad, but I believe that everyone can learn to be good.

We're all animals with a highly dysfunctional belief that our superiority over other species comes with perks like morality. We have devolved to question the actions we take for species wide survival. The puppet that closed the lid is not evil and the puppet that helped open the lid is not good. They are merely viewed as tools. Or rather variables in the equation of survival. The puppet that helped open the lid is viewed as valuable, not morally just, because it is seen as useful in the eyes of the baby. We have just labeled selfish actions (such as the bunny taking the ball) as evil because they interfere with the survival of the herd as a whole. It's more of a debate of self vs group and who benefits.

Both, kids are annoying because they lie, and have crap social manors, they lie because the need to learn how far they can push their boundrys. The world is full of contradictions, and being 'bad' to one set of people is ok while being bad to another is fine. Such as being bullys to people who commit crimes, thats ok, but being bullys to school children is not. These social values are not breed, but learned. The ablity to learn them, group them is. But what is right and wrong is not.

That is not to say some people are not wired differently, and can not figure out right from wrong, or can not understand certain aspects of their actions.

Such as babies, for the first couple of weeks they have little to no understanding of how they can influence anything around them. Then they start throwing any thing you hand to them on the ground, because they realize they can influence you in picking it up. An action and reaction. To them it feels like playing, but they are actually learning how to interact with the world.

TLDR: Babies, humans, are a learning machine, what they learn is dependent on what you teach them.

Also good and bad are values, my idea of good maybe totally different then yours.

Make distinctions between behaviour and temperament/personality, and ditch the whole morality angle.

Maybe then this discussion can birth some value.

Interesting how many people connect morality as an exclusively human trait, someone even suggested it didn't exist in nature. Yet there have been several studies on many animals that exhibit "good" moral behavior. I don't want to spam in links so I'll try to list a few highlights.

Many monkeys demonstrate fairness and compassion. In one study for example monkeys will opt for rewards that are shared rather than for rewards that only benefit themselves. They're able to recognize when another monkey is being treated better or worse than they are and they'll respond accordingly. Chimpanzees care for their elderly. Bonobos will lick blood from wounds they inflict on others. And it doesn't just stop with monkeys. Elephants will attempt to carry other elephants who are sick or dying and have even been shown to assist other types of animals, in one case releasing a group of antelope that were contained in an enclosure in South Africa. And perhaps my favorite is a University of Chicago study published in late 2012 which showed that rats also demonstrate compassion and empathy. In the study one rat would be locked into a cage while the other rat was placed outside the cage near chocolate. 23 out of the 30 rats in the study ignored the chocolate and instead worked to free the other rat from it's cage so that both rats could then enjoy the treat. In this case, I'd wager a rat would probably demonstrate better morals than most humans I know! Other animals who have shown morals? Wolves, whales, dolphins and bats to name a few more.

So if you're one of those out there who think it's humans who have the market cornered on morality, spend a few minutes googling up exactly what it is animals have been up to all this time. It's really fascinating.

No, babies are born selfish. I think that has to be the fundamental state of mind for every organism. Anything else is taught.

What I got out of that experiment wasn't anything to do with whether babies are born selfless or selfish. What the results seem to suggest is that babies can recognize the difference between selfless and selfish behavior. It doesn't show anything about what the babies themselves feel. I mean even selfish people like selfless people better. A baby wants and needs to be taken care of, so you should expect them to reach out for a helpful character over one that stops people from having what they want, if indeed they can tell the difference.

However, I'm not even convinced of that, because this doesn't look like the most scientific setup, anyway. It could be a trick of the camera angle, but it looks like the researchers in the video are holding the "nice" puppet closer to the babies than the "mean" puppet. If the baby truly doesn't understand the scene they just watched, then they're way more likely to reach out for the nearer puppet.

To answer the original question, I believe in tabula rasa. We're not born with any opinions. Those are all formulated later. I'm pretty sure research has already indicated that babies take time to learn about the world around them.

No. Babies are not born with any sort of disposition. Both good and bad are learned from who or whatever they are raised by. Obviously they become selfish, rude, and manipulative, which I think are evolved from their natural instincts to survive at birth. That doesn't make them 'bad' though.

There are plenty of mental illnesses that you can have at birth, and many mental illnesses make you more inclined to act like an asshole. Which is not to say that you have no accountability for being that way, with the right upbringing you can learn to be polite even if you're bipolar or whatever. So sort of?

They said in the video that the researcher holding up the "nice" and "mean" puppets is not aware of which was which in the puppet show before hand. Unless they're incompetent, any professional researcher is going to work eliminate all variables other than the one factor that they wish to measure anyway.

And it's not just an issue of "helpful vs unhelpful" as the babies actually preferred the unhelpful puppet when punished puppet was either previously mean, or liked something that they didn't. This was the case by 81 percent in the Cheerios vs Graham crackers study.