WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even infants can tell the difference between naughty and nice playmates, and know which to choose, a new study finds.

Babies as young as 6 to 10 months old showed crucial social judging skills before they could talk, according to a study by researchers at Yale University's Infant Cognition Center published in Thursday's journal Nature.

The infants watched a googly eyed wooden toy trying to climb roller-coaster hills and then another googly eyed toy come by and either help it over the mountain or push it backward. They then were presented with the toys to see which they would play with.

Nearly every baby picked the helpful toy over the bad one.

The babies also chose neutral toys -- ones that didn't help or hinder -- over the naughty ones. And the babies chose the helping toys over the neutral ones.


Full story: http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/11/21/infant.judging.ap/index.html

By teaching infants that it's okay to play with the "googly-eyed," this is really a proactive exercise in developing tolerance for noodlers and people who look like me. God bless the high-minded in academia.

But does the fact that I'm a prosecutor mean that babies will spurn me, or is that mantle of mean reserved only for one particularly successful state's advocate in Texas's largest city?

The study itself, or the fact that it's someone's job to think up and implement this study.

And really, how do we know the child is responding to the actions of the toy and not the appearance of the toy, or which toy was placed first, or any number of extrenous factors that could've differentiated one googly-eyed toy from the other?

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But does the fact that I'm a prosecutor mean that babies will spurn me, or is that mantle of mean reserved only for one particularly successful state's advocate in Texas's largest city?

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Reserved for the one in Houston.