resting kitten: March 2019

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Devil or angel....

By Wendy Wippel

Arber Tasimi was your basic carefree collegiate until targeted in two completely random attacks in just a few weeks. Then he didn’t leave his house for months. When he did, it was to study the basic nature of humankind using the “raw materials”. Meaning babies. Before societal morals were introduced. His findings? well…downright Biblical.

Tasimi went to work as a researcher at Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center, intent on discovering where, as humans, our ethical framework really comes from, his recent Series of Unfortunate Events causing him to wonder, in his own words, “are we a failed species?”

The experiments that ensued were ingenious. The lab produced animated videos that that featured three specific animated shapes with goggle eyes. The main character, let’s say a green square, is depicted as a man on a mission-specifically, to climb up a mountain. The second character, maybe a blue circle, plays a villain, who constantly knocks the protagonist back to his starting point, and the third, a helper (maybe a yellow triangle) comes to the main character’s assistance by knocking the villain out of commission.) The scnenarios-with the same characters, readily identified by shape and color-were repeated six times, with very minor differences, so that the children got the chance to confirm that the blue circle was always mean, and the yellow triangle was always nice.

Researchers then determined how the babies (initially 6-12 months old) felt about the characters by giving each child an opportunity to choose which character (offered now as plush dolls in the same outfits) they wished to interact with.

read more...here

Quite interesting.....
Blessings

Yaddy