Babies know if you're nice!
Written by Harriet
A recent study by a group of professors at the University of British Columbia into social evolution sheds light on babies' preference for kindness. They set up a situation where the babies were introduced to puppets that were either kind or unkind. Babies aged 5 months uniformly preferred the puppets who act nicely towards. In itself, that makes sense to us - we know that from birth, babies have a natural tendency to prefer favourable environments and relationships and babies do prefer to be with people who are loving, nurturing and kind. They do not like threatening or unkind behaviour - why would they? (The tendency to prefer safety and avoid danger is true even in the womb; for instance during amniocentesis babies are freqently observed moving away from the needle).
What's most interesting about this study is the behaviour of the 8 month old babies. They acted positively towards the sociable, kind puppets, and acted negatively towards those who were unkind, or antisocial, actually withholding treats from the unkind puppets.
Babiesknow is based on the belief that babies are aware and sensitive, so we know that babies know! But it's good to see more studies getting into the public arena, and we found this one while surfing #babies on twitter. You can read more at http://bit.ly/uSyp9z.