Transcript Soderstrom – moral choice study

Soderstrom – moral choice study

[Dr. Soderstrom:] So this was a study that was originally developed by a researcher named Kiley Hamlin and what she was able to show was that infants would prefer shapes that were behaving in a way that was kind of a nice way of behaving over shapes that were behaving in a mean way. So, it was a way of being able to show that fairly young infants have this – some sort of degree of moral understanding.

[Researcher talking to parent:] Basically, she is going to be watching videos in whatever comfortable position you want to be in as long as she is just facing that middle screen, she’s good to go.

[Dr. Soderstrom:] So, in this case what we do is the babies come in and the mother just closes her eyes so she doesn’t see the visual display. And the baby’s sitting on the mom’s lap and then there’s a visual – a video of a shape trying to get up a little hill and then you have two other shapes. One of the shapes is kind of pushing the original shape up the hill. That’s the helper shape. And then there’s a hinderer shape that pushes the shape down the hill. And then after they’ve accumulated a certain amount of looking to the videos and after they habituate to a certain amount to the videos to show that they’ve gotten what they want to out of it, then we do a test where we actually present a live three dimensional choice for them of the helper and the hinderer shapes and see which one they prefer to touch.

[Researcher talking to parent:] The second section of this study is a little more particular. So, it’s only sixty seconds to choose a toy. So I’m going to come in with a choice board with two real life versions of the shapes from the videos that she just watched and I’m just to going basically see which one she wants to choose to play with. So this one has a bit more of a specific seating position that I’m going to ask you to be in. So, I’m just going to ask that you sit with both of your feet together and your knees together. You’re going to hold her equally between both knees. Instead of pulling her back, just have her with her legs dangling over the edge so that she can reach more easily towards the shape. And then just have your hands just around the rib cage. Sometimes if your holding around it’s a little bit harder for her to reach as well. So, it’s just important during these sixty seconds that you are just being very conscious not to distract her, talk to her and that you are just kind of being her chair. So, try not to position her once you’re in that first position.

[Researcher talking to baby:]

Look

Who do you like?

We picked the blue one pretty fast.

Oh, we got the whole thing. Good job!

[Dr. Soderstrom:] And that’s actually a really challenging thing with babies, especially the younger babies who might be reaching with both hands. So, there’s quite a careful articulation of what counts as a choice.

Of course, it’s very important in these studies that the infant’s preference is not based on a preference for a triangle or a square but actually based on the videos that they were watching. So, there are a number of things done to prevent those biases. One of them is that they – when the original shapes were designed there was a lot of work put into making sure that they were equally salient or interesting to the babies in terms of their colours and their size and everything. And then in the design of the experiment, we make sure that for some babies it’s the square that’s the helper and for some babies, it’s the triangle that’s the helper. And also, the researcher is blind to which shape is the helper or the hinderer in that particular study. So, in fact, we don’t even know which, whether it’s the square or the triangle that was helper or the hinderer until after we do the data analysis. It gets recorded by the computer but we don’t look at those data until all of the data have been collected.

And then since that original study emerged there’s been attempts to replicate it. Some of them have been successful and some of them haven’t. So, this research endeavour now is trying to do a larger scale replication because this particular protocol is actually really challenging to do and so when other laboratories were having trouble replicating one important possibility is just that they weren’t doing it right. So Kylie is – and some other researchers like Kelsey Lucca and others have been sort of championing developing the protocol in a way that lots of laboratories can learn to do and so you can have a much larger scale replication effort where people are actually being trained by the original researchers and we can see – can this – how well does this replicate outside of those original laboratories.