Haki Kapasi, one of Black Voices Network's founding members and the director of Inspire, brought my attention to an article about the findings of recent research on very young children.
According to Jessica Sommerville at the University of Washington, babies as young as fifteen months are able to distinguish between fairness and unfairness in the uneven distribution of food. She says:-
Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion.
For a link to the full article, click here.
I can't help smiling at the thought that children may be born with an innate sense of social justice. Now, what do we have to do to stop them losing it?
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