Moral kombat (with Kiley Hamlin)

We were so lucky to be joined in this episode by the inestimable Professor Kiley Hamlin. In the first segment, we chatted about how Kiley got interested in developmental science as well as about what it was like to be trained by Amanda Woodward (undergrad), Karen Wynn (grad), Paul Bloom (grad), and Laurie Santos (grad).

In the second segment, we chat about her recent paper in Nature Communications — this paper tested whether sociomoral evaluation is innate in 5 day olds. We also chat about how to reconcile the main finding of this paper — that 5-day-olds prefer helping events over hindering events — with the recent ManyBabies failure (you'll definitely want to hear her thoughts), as well as about her recent struggles to replicate classic findings in the lab but not online. We pondered about whether this is unique to Professor Hamlin or in fact is indicative of a much larger issue in the field. You're in for a treat with this one.

Links

Geraci, A., Surian, L., Tina, L. G., & Hamlin, J. K. (2025). Human newborns spontaneously attend to prosocial interactions. Nature Communications, 16(1), 6304. Link