Daryl wrote:Sorry Tenshinia, but he has got you there.
Much as I loved my kids and then grandkids they had to be civilised by much discipline over time. At first they were totally selfish little savages, then with much effort turned into the caring people they are now
That´s because you´re almost certainly ignoring the first 2-3 years in favour of when you can for certain understand them.
The studies i referred to investigated from a few months old and up.
With the children showing either puzzlement or unhappyness if presented with a show of bias or egoism.
(they basically came up with some extremely simplified theater plays to show individual children comfortably placed in their mother´s arms while watching, filming the face of the infant/child to be able to determine reactions)
Selfishness peaks somewhere around age 3-4. When children have learned to be selfish from their interaction with surroundings(if they have siblings, to a clearly higher degree, especially if their siblings are older), but before they get a more conscious level of empathy.
While not unbiased, this article is a halfdecent starter if you want to actually get into the subject:
http://www.vipoa.org/neuropsychol/1/1Certainly it is clear that human egoism is insufficient in explaining all aspects of 'altruistic' behaviour. It thus follows that the assumption of universal egoism must be replaced by a more complex assumption allowing room for both egoism and altruismUnfortunately it is not recent enough to include the results of the studies i referred to.
And a common failure of logic in regards to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholog ... ircularitySome minor additions:
http://www.parentingscience.com/newborn ... world.htmlOh, wait, i finally managed to find an article that refers to at least some of the studies i referred to, it´s a bit too old(2010) to include the most interesting ones that were done only a few years ago, but it says pretty much what i said, more or less.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magaz ... .html?_r=0A 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....
For many years the conventional view was that young humans take a surprisingly long time to learn basic facts about the physical world (like that objects continue to exist once they are out of sight) and basic facts about people (like that they have beliefs and desires and goals) — let alone how long it takes them to learn about morality.
I am admittedly biased, but I think one of the great discoveries in modern psychology is that this view of babies is mistaken....
And well before their 2nd birthdays, babies are sharp enough to know that other people can have false beliefs. This was something that is considered an absolute truth that it could not happen before around age 4. It has effectively been disproven by now, but psychology as a subject still considers the old truth the ONLY truth.
In addition, scientists know that certain compassionate feelings and impulses emerge early and apparently universally in human development. These are not moral concepts, exactly, but they seem closely related....
Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting that they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain, not merely to a certain pitch of sound. Babies also seem to want to assuage the pain of others: once they have enough physical competence (starting at about 1 year old), they soothe others in distress by stroking and touching or by handing over a bottle or toy. There are individual differences, to be sure, in the intensity of response: some babies are great soothers; others don’t care as much. But the basic impulse seems common to all....
Some recent studies have explored the existence of behavior in toddlers that is “altruistic” in an even stronger sense — like when they give up their time and energy to help a stranger accomplish a difficult task. The psychologists Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello have put toddlers in situations in which an adult is struggling to get something done, like opening a cabinet door with his hands full or trying to get to an object out of reach. The toddlers tend to spontaneously help, even without any prompting, encouragement or reward.So nope, he did not "get me there". And your statement is essentially irrelevant due to not looking in the "right direction".
