by Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad
Excerpted from NPR.org
A 2-year-old, it turns out, knows the difference between right and wrong. According to psychologist Judi Smetana, the sense of morality begins to develop early in humans.
And by the time children are 3 to 4 years old, they recognize certain behaviors — such as hitting — as wrong, even when no one is watching, says Smetana, a professor at the University of Rochester.
Children are also capable of distinguishing between social rules and moral rules. ...
Smetana believes that children know more about morality than they're able to articulate, especially when they're toddlers. "We are born with some very rudimentary sense of empathy hard-wired in," she says.
A study published last month bolsters the theory that empathy is coded into human genes. A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Oregon Health and Science University found that a highly social strain of mice could learn to connect a tone played in a specific cage to something negative, merely by hearing the distressed squeak of a mouse who received a shock in the cage when the tone was played. When a mouse who had observed the distress was then placed in the cage and played the same tone, it exhibited signs of stress even though it did not experience a shock.
If a highly social mouse can relate another mouse's stress to itself, does this suggest that there's an evolutionary advantage to empathy? And if humans have inherited this advantage and are in fact genetically hard-wired to be empathetic, how does empathy relate to the moral development of children? Read the full article and listen online here.