Those were interesting articles, thank you. Little kids can be sweet and intuitive about other's feelings, they are not always selfish especially with adults. These experiments were done with objects, puppets, and adults. I think children at a very early age discover that pleasing adults results in smiles, cuddles, hugs, treats, etc. It would be interesting if they would be able to just observe behavior of a group of toddlers interacting with limited toys or treats without adult influence. I think fewer of them would be altruistic. Don't get me wrong I loved being an early childhood teacher. Everyday they made me smile no matter what was going on outside of work. I just don't think you can claim they have an innate morality. They start learning the day they are born so it is difficult to tell what is nature or nurture.
Here are some quotes from the first article that support my thoughts:
“Where morality comes from is a really hard problem,” says Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. “There isn’t a moral module that is there innately. But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue. Yes, a baby prefers the good guy—unless the bad one, like the baby, eats graham crackers. If the good guy is a green-bean eater, forget it. Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head. In the spontaneous responses of the newest humans, “We’re seeing the underbelly of judgments we make as adults but try not to,” she says.
