ABSTRACT
By the second birthday children from many cultures show uncertainty with regard to broken or flawed objects, empathy with the distress of another, and anxiety over possible task failure. Because it is unlikely that parents across the world begin to socialize these acts at the same time, the temporal concordance implies a biologically based preparedness to judge acts as right or wrong, where “preparedness” is used in the same sense intended by linguists who claim that two-year-old children are prepared to speak their language.
