With each new study on the social behaviors of babies we realize that many of them are acquired much earlier than we thought. It was thought that after two years, children began to show signs of altruism and that only with 6 or 7 years did they understand the notion of justice, but a new study has revealed that this happens much earlier: Babies have a sense of justice and altruism with 15 months.
At that age they are already able to distinguish perfectly inequality situations as if one person has received less food than another and they have cooperative behaviors showing willingness to share spontaneously.
To prove it, psychologists from the University of Washington investigated the behavior of 47 babies 15 months of age, to which they underwent two tests.
The first test was to show videos in which food was distributed to two people, first equitably and then privileging one. Based on the theory that babies pay more attention when they are surprised, they discovered that children spent more time watching the screen when food distribution was unfair.
In the second test, to check if the babies' sense of justice is related to their own willingness to share, the researchers asked them to choose their favorite toy between two toys and observed whether or not they were willing to share them with an unknown person. A third of the children shared their favorite toy, another third delivered the other and the rest did not share any.
Interestingly, they also found a relationship between justice and altruism, since babies who were more sensitive to the equitable distribution of food, were also more likely to share their favorite toy unselfishly.
As we see, babies have a sense of justice and altruism at just 15 months old, when they are not even able to express it in words, which, according to the researchers, indicates that they are values that they acquire through what they observe in their parents and in their environment. As you can see, however small they may seem, we are educating them by example since they were born.
