Heads up parents, your babies are watching you to determine if you’re a friend or foe. New research published in the British Journal of Psychology, shows that babies younger than one can practice empathy and pick out someone who is being bullied at the tender age of 6 months.
“Even during the first year of life, babies are able to identify figures who “deserve” empathy and which ones do not, and if it appears that there is no justification for the other one’s distress, no preference is shown,” said Dr. Florina Uzefovsky, head of the Ben-Gurion University Bio-Empathy Lab, and senior lecturer at the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience.
In their experiments, Uzefovsky and colleagues observed that five-to-nine-month-old infants clearly hold a pro-victim preference. Researchers showed the babies videos depicting a square figure with eyes climb a hill, meet a circular friendly figure, then happily go down the hill together, all the while displaying clear positive or neutral feelings.
However, in the second video, the same round figure hits and bullies the square figure until it goes back down the hill, showing distress by crying and doubling over. Given the opportunity to select those figures as physical toys, the babies clearly preferred the square who demonstrated distress, thus practicing empathy.
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