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Moral masters or moral apprentices? A connectionist account of sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants

Numerous studies suggest that preverbal infants possess the ability to make sociomoral judgements and demonstrate a preference for prosocial agents. Some theorists argue that infants possess an “innate moral core” that guides their sociomoral reasoning. However, we propose that infants’ capacity for putative sociomoral evaluation and reasoning can just as likely be driven by a domain-general associative-learning mechanism that is sensitive to agent action. We implement this theoretical account in a connectionist computational model and show that it can account for the pattern of results in Hamlin et al. (2007) and Hamlin and Wynn (2011). These are pioneering studies in this area and were among the first studies to examine sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Based on the results of 6 computer simulations, we suggest that a domain-general associative-learning mechanism can account for previous findings on preverbal infants’ capacity for sociomoral evaluation. These results suggest that an innate moral core may not be necessary to account for apparent sociomoral evaluation in infants.