Showing–not just telling–how babies know right from wrong
Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University, has an interesting article in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about morality in babies–how experimenters are demonstrating that babies know right from wrong, in several different contexts.
It’s a very nice example of work by a scientist-writer. Thankfully for those of us who are writers but not scientists, most scientists are not very good at this sort of thing. That’s what keeps us in business. But some are, and Bloom is one of them.
Without taking anything away from Bloom, however, the main reason I’m posting this is because I want to point you to the video that the Times did on its website to accompany the article.
In the piece, Bloom explains how babies tell researchers what they’re thinking by looking longer at something that they like or that is surprising or unexpected. Like me, you might be skeptical of this sort of thing. It’s apparently well established that “looking-time” studies do show important things about what’s going on inside babies’ bald or fuzzy heads, but it seems, well, a little hard to believe.
You might find yourself more willing to believe–indeed, you might find yourself amazed–when you watch the video of babies actually doing this.
It’s a good example of how multimedia content–yikes, where did I get that awful jargon?–I mean, a good example of how a little video on the web can add a lot to the text.
What we have here, in sum, is a very nice story, and an even nicer bit of video.
By the way, that picture on the left above is either a picture of a baby or a very, very, very old man. Not entirely sure.
- Paul Raeburn
May 10th, 2010 at 1:36 pm
Agreed that the article and video are terrific. But I have a question about one of the underlying studies in the video. It doesn’t seem to have been blinded, so I wonder how real the results are. When the baby “correctly” picks the puppet that it prefers, the researcher warmly responds “Yes, that was the helpful puppet!!” So in other words, unless I’m missing something here, the person conducting the experiment knew the desired outcome.
May 10th, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Tom,
Fair point, and I think we need to continue to be skeptical about these studies. The video made a believer of me, for the most part, but didn’t address the question you raise. And it’s fair to ask reporters to raise that, although, in this case, the reporter was writing about his own work. So his editors should have asked him to address that.
May 11th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Reaction from a former local TV reporter. I hated the constraints and shallowness, but boy pix and sound were…ARE…GREAT tools. The video piece was wonderfully produced.