The Emergence of Morality in the Second Year of Life

Emotion Review, 2011

Emotional action and communication are integral to the development of morality, here conceptualized as our concerns for the well-being of other people and the ability to act on those concerns. Focusing on the second year of life, this article suggests a number of ways in which young children's emotions and caregivers' emotional communication contribute to early forms of helping, empathy, and learning about prohibitions. We argue for distinguishing between moral issues and other normative issues also in the study of early moral development, for considering a wider range of emotional phenomena than the "moral emotions" most commonly studied, and for paying more attention to how specific characteristics of early emotional interactions facilitate children's development of a concern for others.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Current Biology, 2008

2013

Although developmental psychologists traditionally explore morality from a learning and development perspective, some aspects of the human moral sense may be built-in, having evolved to sustain collective action and cooperation as required for successful group living. In this article, I review a recent body of research with infants and toddlers, demonstrating surprisingly sophisticated and flexible moral behavior and evaluation in a preverbal population whose opportunity for moral learning is limited at best. Although this work itself is in its infancy, it supports theoretical claims that human morality is a core aspect of human nature.

Child Development, 2012

Developmental trajectories and individual differences in 70 American middle income 2½ to 4-year olds' moral judgments were examined three times across 1 year using latent growth modeling. At Wave 1, children distinguished hypothetical moral from conventional transgressions on all criteria, but only older preschoolers did so when rating deserved punishment. Children's understanding of moral transgressions as wrong independent of authority grew over time. Greater surgency and effortful control were both associated with a better understanding of moral generalizability. Children higher in effortful control also grew more slowly in understanding that moral rules are not alterable and that moral transgressions are wrong independent of rules. Girls demonstrated sharper increases across time than boys in understanding the nonalterability of moral rules.

2020

According to many scholars, prosociality, in particular altruism and empathic concern, is considered an important motivational factor both in adulthood and in the development of morality (Batson & Shaw, 1991; Jensen et al., 2014; Nichols, 2004; Roughley & Bayertz, 2019). So far, a large number of studies have addressed the development of children's first-party prosociality and their third-party understanding of moral norms separately. In particular, there is much evidence that during the second year of life, young children develop empathic concern and sympathy for others in need in prosocial situations (Hepach, 2017; Hepach et al., 2012). Moreover, recent findings suggest that 18-month-old infants already show some rudimentary forms of norm understanding in at least dyadic conventional situations. This rudimentary norm understanding is interpreted as second-personal normative expectations (Schmidt et al., 2019). Finally, 3-year-old children not only have descriptive expectations...

Child Development Perspectives, 2018

In this article, I use infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness as a test case to identify the extents and limits of infants' sociomoral cognition and behavior. Infants' sensitivity to distributive fairness is in some ways commensurate with this understanding in older children and adults; infants expect fair distributions of resources and evaluate others based on their adherence to or violation of fairness norms. Yet these sensitivities also differ in important ways, including that infants do not spontaneously punish unfair individuals. I address questions about the role of experience in infants' development of sociomoral cognition and behavior, and whether infants' moral cognition and behavior are differentiated appropriately (from their social knowledge and behavior) and integrated (across subaspects of morality). I suggest two approaches to move the field forward: investigating processes that contribute to developing sociomoral cognition and behavior, and considering infants' successes and failures in this domain. Keywords social-moral cognition and behavior; prosocial behavior Scholars have long been interested in the developmental origins of our moral sentiments and behavior. Initial psychological research suggested that moral knowledge and behavior arose from the development of sophisticated reasoning processes, so a true sense of morality was seen as a relatively late accomplishment, achieved in adolescence or later (1, 2). Subsequent work pushed the origins of morality to the preschool years by demonstrating that children reason differently about violations in the moral, societal, and psychological domains, and tend to see moral actions as abiding by a unique set of principles (3-5). However, over the last 10 to 15 years, researchers have begun to investigate the origins of morality in the first two years of life. Several factors have driven these investigations. First, mature moral judgments apparently not only rely on complex, explicit reasoning processes, but also stem from more implicit processes such as moral emotions that are, or may be, available to infants (6, 7). Second, moral tendencies may serve an adaptive value, suggesting a possible evolutionary basis (8)

Moral evaluations constitute a fundamental aspect of human psychology. How does moral competence develop? For decades, this question has been addressed within cognitive-developmental frameworks (e.g., Killen & Smetana, in press;, and the general answer has been that moral development is a constructivist process: children develop the ability to make increasingly sophisticated moral distinctions by actively reasoning about their social experiences. This proposal features prominently in "social domain theory" , which argues for coexisting domains of social understanding. Moral norms (characterized as governing actions with consequences for others' welfare) comprise one domain, and conventional norms (characterized as governing actions that affect social order) comprise another domain. A major claim of social domain theory is that young children construct different domains of social understanding at an early age by interacting with adults and peers and by attending to qualitatively distinct features of these social experiences. Does this account of moral development effectively explain the emergence of moral thought and the changes that occur throughout childhood?

JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE, 2021

Moral development has its roots early in life. Children are found to be born with a primary sense of right and wrong. As they grow and socialize, the experiences train their understanding of expectations, the reward, and punitive outcomes to them and others via their intentions and actions. Several researchers have investigated the onset and emergence of morality during the early years. Theorists vary in their perspectives: those who examine morality range in their explanations from infants being born with no moral sense (social learning and behaviorist theories), to those who believe humans are self-oriented, to those who believe that human reasoning abilities separate us from the rest of creation (cognitive development theories), and finally, to those who believe that humans beings are born with potentialities for moral actions. The current article examines the past literature on morality and its bidirectional influence on childhood and adolescent experiences and behaviors.

The developmental origins of moral concern: An examination of moral boundary decision making throughout childhood, 2018

Prominent theorists have made the argument that modern humans express moral concern for a greater number of entities than at any other time in our past. Moreover, adults show stable patterns in the degrees of concern they afford certain entities over others, yet it remains unknown when and how these patterns of moral decision-making manifest in development. Children aged 4 to 10 years (N = 151) placed 24 pictures of human, animal, and environmental entities on a stratified circle representing three levels of moral concern. Although younger and older children expressed similar overall levels of moral concern, older children demonstrated a more graded understanding of concern by including more entities within the outer reaches of their moral circles (i.e., they were less likely to view moral inclusion as a simple in vs. out binary decision). With age children extended greater concern to humans than other forms of life, and more concern to vulnerable groups, such as the sick and disabled. Notably, children's level of concern for human entities predicted their prosocial behavior. The current research provides novel insights into the development of our moral reasoning and its structure within childhood.