I think morals with a hefty does of compassion and empathy helps keep some from falling into the 'immorality of morality' trap.

I did inhale.

waiting for my physical therapist this morning I picked up an old People magazine and flipped it open. It fell open to a story about TEACH Ministries, it is great that this woman saw the light but sad what her moral certainties lost her.

or a social one?

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

Babies can spot nice and nasty characters

Infants as young as six months instinctively prefer helpful characters.

Michael Hopkin

...Research led by Kiley Hamlin, a graduate student at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, shows that babies less than a year old can judge the niceness or nastiness of others, even when watching events that don't directly affect them. The researchers made the discovery using nothing more high-tech than a simple puppet show.

After watching the show, the babies, aged either six months or ten months, instinctively preferred 'nice' characters over less helpful ones. This kind of skill may be useful in helping them learn the right values as their social awareness develops later in childhood.

"We knew that babies were socially skilled, but we weren't aware that they were so skilled that they could track people by their behavioural tendencies; how they might treat someone else," says Hamlin.

Evil puppets

Going up? Kids tend to approach the puppet that helped its mate up the hill.Nature
Hamlin and her colleagues showed the babies a puppet show in which the central character, a brightly coloured round wooden block complete with googly eyes, tried in vain to scale a steep hill. The puppet was then either given a friendly shove up the hill by a 'good Samaritan' puppet, or thwarted by an evil puppet who pushed the climber back down.

After the show, the babies were encouraged to reach out for either the helper or the hinderer puppet. Almost all favoured the helper, Hamlin and her colleagues report in this week's Nature 1.

"This suggests to us that at least they're able to tell them apart, and also that they have some tendency towards the positive helper," Hamlin says. "We were shocked by the strength of the responses. We thought infants would be sensitive to the behaviour of others, but didn't anticipate the extent of this."

What's more, the effect was not so marked when the puppets' googly eyes were removed, showing that the babies identify with the puppets as characters and make their choice on the basis of the characters' actions, even though the babies were not personally affected by the show's events.

In a second experiment, the babies were again shown the puppet show, and then saw the climber subsequently appear to 'make friends' with either helper or hinderer. The older babies spent longer looking at it when the climber approached the hinderer, suggesting that they found this event more surprising. The result shows that the older babies, although not the younger ones, can draw fairly sophisticated conclusions about the social attitudes and motives of others, say the researchers.

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