Margot+Pitney+RP+Post+2


 * 1) 1. Are humans innately good?
 * 2) 2. Are we naturally good or bad?
 * 3) 3. Tom Stafford, BBC Future
 * 4) 4. [].
 * 5) 5. Accessed at home, using Google, on May 25th 2014
 * 6) 6. Tom Stafford informatively explains to the readers - skeptics and believers alike -that a study done with babies serves as evidence that humans are innately good and exposes the reader to a possible settlement or additional piece of information to an ongoing debate.
 * 7) 7. The source explains the ongoing debate of whether or not people are born good. It then proceeds to describe an experiment that contributes to the debate.
 * 8) 8. The author claims that although this study does not prove that humans are innately good or settle the debate, it does, at minimum add evidence.
 * 9) 9. I have heard of this study before and was not very convinced due to some flaws I noticed (granted, scientifically speaking I do not know if these flaws would at all affect the experiment). However, the author was unbiased and acknowledged both sides of the debate and consequently validated his point and made him more believable.
 * 10) 10. “ Babies are humans with the absolute minimum of cultural influence – they don't have many friends, have never been to school and haven't read any books. They can't even control their own bowels, let alone speak the language, so their minds are as close to innocent as a human mind can get.” “The way to make sense of this result is if infants, with their pre-cultural brains had expectations about how people should act. Not only do they interpret the movement of the shapes as resulting from motivations, but they prefer helping motivations over hindering ones.” “This doesn't settle the debate over human nature. A cynic would say that it just shows that infants are self-interested and expect others to be the same way.” “At a minimum though, it shows that tightly bound into the nature of our developing minds is the ability to make sense of the world in terms of motivations, and a basic instinct to prefer friendly intentions over malicious ones. It is on this foundation that adult morality is built.”