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10. Babies’ capability of feeling empathy

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Question:
Using points and examples from the talk, explain babies’ capability of feeling empathy presented by the professor.

 

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Texts

Ok, we generally assume that babies can feel only very basic emotions like happiness or anger. That is, babies just react to things that happen directly to them. However, some new researches suggesting that some babies may be able to feel concern for others, to have empathy for others. Now, empathy is a complex emotion. It involves babies’ relating to someone else’ emotions, not just reacting to things happening directly to them. Let’s talk about an experiment that may show that babies could be capable of feeling empathy.
Ok, for the first part of the experiment, well, we’ve always known that babies start to cry when they hear other babies’ crying, right? One baby in a room starts crying and all the rest join in. We’ve always assumed that the other babies cried because they were reacting to the noise of the crying. That the noise itself was distressing. So in the experiment, researchers played a tape recording, a tape of babies’ crying to another baby. And sure enough, the baby started crying when he heard the sound of other babies’ crying. This was no surprise of course. And the researchers assumed that the baby cried because of the noise.
But the next part of the experiment was surprising. The researchers played the baby a tape of his own crying, now it was just as noisy. So the researchers expected him to cry. However, this time, the baby did not cry. He wasn’t upset by the sound of his own crying. Why not? Well, maybe it wasn’t the noise that had made him cry before, when he heard other babies crying, in fact, maybe noise had nothing to do with it, it could be that the baby felt empathy for the other babies. And that was why he got upset when he heard them crying. The researchers concluded that it is indeed possible that babies feel empathy, concern for others.

 

Explanation

The summary of the lecture
The professor explains that an experiment was conducted in which some babies were able to feel empathy which is a feeling of concern for others.
For the first part of the experiment, researchers played a tape of babies crying.
It is known that when one baby starts to cry, other babies in the room cry too.
The assumed reason is that babies react to the noise of the crying.
As researchers expected, in the experiment, when a baby heard that tape of babies crying, he started crying.
For the second part of the experiment, the researchers had the baby hear the tape of his own crying.
And researchers expected the baby to cry from the sound of the noise.
Surprisingly, this time the baby did not cry.
The researchers concluded that the noise had nothing to do with the baby’s crying.
Maybe the baby cried because he felt empathy for other babies who were crying.

Sample answer
In the lecture, the professor discusses an experiment aimed at investigating empathy, the feeling of concern for others, in babies.

In the first part of the experiment, researchers played a recording of babies crying, a sound known to trigger crying in other babies due to their natural response to the noise. As anticipated, when a baby heard the recording of crying babies, they also began crying in response.

In the second part of the experiment, researchers exposed the baby to a recording of their own crying. Contrary to expectations, the baby did not cry upon hearing their own cries. This unexpected outcome led researchers to speculate that the baby’s crying in the first part of the experiment may not have been solely a reaction to the noise of crying babies. Instead, researchers proposed that the baby’s crying may have been driven by empathy for the other crying babies, rather than simply reacting to the noise.