如何解释仁慈和残忍？我们头脑中正确和错误观念从何而来？人们为什么常常会地在道德问题上持有不同意见？本课程将探讨道德的心理基础。
How Do We Naturally Respond to Strangers?
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來自 Yale University 的課程
日常生活中的道德
602 個評分
從本節課中
Family, Friends, and Strangers
Our moral feelings are usually most powerful towards our kin (such as our parents and our children) and our friends and allies. We will discuss these special bonds, and then turn to the morality of racial and ethnic bias. Then we use the tools of behavioral economics to explore the controversial question of whether we are ever truly altruistic to strangers.
與講師見面
Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
If I'm right that kindness to strangers is
in some sense unnatural, this makes predictions about children.
And what I want to do in this very short lecture is talk about
some research that uses the same economic
games to study the behavior of young children.
So we, we know that children respond often
very poorly to strangers, they get very anxious
next to strangers, they panic psychologists call it stranger
anxiety, but we also know that when we are
old enough to participate in these economic games they
behave quite differently from adults in the same society.
So adults, you'll remember, when given the dictator game,
are quite generous, giving 20, 30, 40, sometimes 50%.
Kids don't. There are now dozens
of studies where you test children at
different ages, where you give them some resource.
And then they get to split the resource with other individuals.
And, what we find is that that they give a lot less.
Kids start off quite stingy and self interested.
And they, they become more and more amenable
to sharing their resources as they get older.
So in
some way they're selfish.
I actually think that there's some
evidence that they're even worse than selfish.
And I'll illustrate this by, by telling you
an experiment I did with Mark Sheskin who's now
a, a post-doc in France and Karen Wynn
my, my colleague and my collaborator here at Yale.
What we did was, we played a certain economic game, with young children.
And the way this game was played was children
get to choose, which of two distributions they want.
They could choose the distribution the green distribution, which is, some
of the poker chips to them, and some to a stranger.
And, or the blue distribution, a different number of poker
chips to them, and a different number to the stranger.
And the poker chips, they were told, could be traded in later for toys.
So they knew they, that they were valuable.
And they were told a stranger
was another child, who was going to come into the
lab later that day, they would never see this child.
So it's anonymous in the same way that the economic games are anonymous.
So we could use this method to do, explore various contrasts.
One contrast is (1,1) versus (2,2). What that means is, the (1,1) is one
for the child, and one for the other, person, versus two
for the child, and two for the other, person.
Now, if children are greedy, they should chose
(2,2), because they get two instead of one.
If children are altruistic, they should chose (2,2),
because the other person gets two instead of one.
So you'd expect no matter what, children to do,
chose (2,2), and in fact that's what they do.
and, and, and this is a way of testing it, or
understanding the experiment, they're motivated to
get the poker chips, and everything.
But here's the interesting part of the study.
They had to contrast (1,1) versus (2,3) or (1,0) versus (2,2),
and I want you think about those just for a bit, figure out what you yourself would
do. So think about (1,1) versus (2,3).
If children are selfish, they should choose (2,3) because two is more than one.
If children are generous, they should choose (2,3) because
three is more than one for the other person.
But you'll notice something funny about that, which is that
the (1,1), they have the same as the other person.
The (2,3), the other person, the stranger is
going to end up with relatively more than them.
The other person will
get three and they'll get two.
Or I'll consider (1,0) versus (2,2).
Again, if children are selfish, they should
choose (2,2), because two is more than one.
If children are generous, they should choose
(2,2), because two is more than zero.
But again, there's something funny about this.
To keep the (1,0), it's true you get less,
but then you get relatively more than the other
person, you get one, the child gets one, the
other child gets nothing, as opposed to (2,2) where
it'd be a little more equal.
Now if you test adults on this, and older children, what you find is that
when playing with a stranger they will choose (2,3) and (2,2).
In some way because you're selfish, in
someway because you're altruistic, but, everybody gets more.
But children from at the age between four and seven, go for (1,1) and (1,0).
And this show's that they're not just selfish, they're
worse than that, they're willing to give up a resource.
So as not to get relatively less than a stranger.
And or to, to, in a, to be in
a situation where they get relatively more than a stranger.
I was presenting this to to a Hillel group, a Jewish group on
campus and somebody came up to me later and told me that this is
reminiscent of a Jewish folktale where an angel comes down from
heaven and meets a very envious man. And the angel
says to the envious man, I will give you anything you want.
But your neighbor will get double.
And the envious man thinks for a minute and
says, I want you to pluck out one my eyes.
I told a story of my lab group and one
of my graduate student says, said you know there is an
Irish folk tale that's exactly the same way except the
punch line is I want you to beat me after death.
And I think this tells us something about human nature.
I think there's some truth although, I've been talking about
the moral powers of children and our innate moral sense.
I think there's some virtue in what Kingsley Amis, the author Kingsley Amis,
once said which is, it's now wonder that people
are so horrible when they start their life as children.
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