Are you a good person?

[Music] The Purge movie franchise portrays a world where citizens of the United States get to rid themselves of all evil by listening and subjecting their actions to their most carnal desires within a 12-hour window. During this time, all criminal activities are legalized. While it admittedly sounds counterintuitive, the idea is that if society allowed people to do whatever they wanted, including specialty criminal activities, for a short window of time, they would exhaust the evil that is in them.

For the rest of the year, as the movie portrays, we'll all be happy and peaceful. The low crime rate, vanishing poverty, and a stronger sense of community are all things the movie portrays as positives. This, however, implies an interesting underlying phenomenon about humans: that deep down we are all evil and all we want to do is kill, murder, and steal, and that if left to our own devices, this is what we would all do.

Now, without taking the script of a science fiction movie too seriously, it's still an interesting question to pose: are humans inherently evil? On the face of it, even I would certainly like to believe we're moral creatures. But if we do indeed believe that we must be, then we must ask how this morality came to be in the first place.

Why is it in us? Psychology and neuroscience will tell us that morality developed out of an evolutionary need. People who distinguish good from bad and do so predictably are much better at banding together and making social companions than those who do not. A partner who can sacrifice you at any moment for their personal gain isn't much of a partner, so it provides a selective advantage to be one, moral, and two, be able to notice morality in others.

It's not a surprise then that our brain has not just one but numerous regions that work together to bring us our moral existence. Some areas, such as the medial prefrontal cortex, are used solely to understand one's own emotions. Others, such as the posterior superior temporal sulcus, are key to understanding the feelings of others.

This idea that our brains evolved to be moral and recognize morality is further reinforced by research done on babies. Studies conducted at the Yale University Infant Cognition Center, also known as the baby lab, involve children under 24 months. They were shown a gray cat struggling to open a plastic box. Researchers showed the cat in two scenarios: one in which a bunny in a green t-shirt comes forward to help the cat open the box, and another in which a bunny in an orange t-shirt not just doesn't help, but rather makes it worse by slamming the box shut.

The babies were then shown both bunnies side by side, and the reactions were monitored. Scientists observed if the babies reached out or stared more than normal at one bunny, with the inference being that they preferred it over the other. It's important to note here that the scientists assume such responses to be positive. Over 80 percent of the babies showed a preference for the good bunny, the one that helped, which in this case was the one in a green t-shirt.

With a much younger group of three-month-olds, this number surprisingly goes up to 87 percent. Now I know what you might be thinking: what if the babies are simply drawn to one color more than the other? Well, when researchers at the baby lab switched the colors, the results were still similar.

While the confidence with which claims are made on babies' ideas about morality varies, the overall conclusion is that they generally seem to prefer nicer people, objects, and animals. Universal moral grammar, or UMG, is another emerging field of research which seeks to rigidly define moral knowledge. UMG wants to answer questions like how moral knowledge is acquired, how it's actualized in the brain, and so forth.

One of the interesting aspects of this research is its focus on language. More specifically, it is focused on the naturally evolving set of terms that make moral distinctions. For example, in English, we have words to describe something as permissible, obligatory, or forbidden. These words didn't simply come to be; they're manifestations of our need to express the subtleties of our...