ScienceDaily -- "That's not fair!" It's a common playground complaint.
But how early do children acquire this sense of fairness? Before they're 2, says a new study. "We found that 19- and 21-month-old infants have a general expectation of fairness, and they can apply it appropriately to different situations," says University of Illinois psychology graduate student Stephanie Sloane, who conducted the study with UI's Renée Baillargeon and David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania.
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This innate moral sense might also explain the power of early trauma, Sloane says. Aside from fairness, research has shown that small children expect people not to harm others and to help others in distress. "If they witness events that violate those expectations in extreme ways, it could explain why these events have such negative and enduring consequences."
MORE: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120218134639.htm
Earlier...
The Moral Life of Babies
A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.
MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?pagewanted=all
