Human Morality Is Based on an Early-Emerging Moral Core

Abstract

Scholars from across the social sciences, biological sciences, and humanities have long emphasized the role of human morality in supporting cooperation. How does morality arise in human development? One possibility is that morality is acquired through years of socialization and active learning. Alternatively, morality is instead based on a “moral core”: primitive abilities that emerge in infancy to make sense of morally relevant behaviors. Here, we review evidence that infants and toddlers understand a variety of morally relevant behaviors and readily evaluate agents who engage in them. These abilities appear to be rooted in the goals and intentions driving agents’ morally relevant behaviors and are sensitive to group membership. This evidence is consistent with a moral core, which may support later social and moral development and ultimately be leveraged for human cooperation. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology, Volume 4 is December 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Toddlers’ social evaluations of agents who act on false beliefs

“…Despite some failures to replicate these findings (Salvadori et al., 2015; Schlingloff et al., 2020), a meta‐analysis of experiments probing early social evaluations found that infants and toddlers demonstrate a significant preference for prosocial over antisocial agents (Margoni & Surian, 2018). Since this meta‐analysis, 13 additional studies have provided evidence that infants and toddlers evaluate agents based on their social actions (see Woo et al., in press), consistent with the hypothesis that infants and toddlers prefer agents who help others to achieve their goals. Margoni and Shepperd (2020) have found, moreover, that the failed replications in this literature are consistent with the expected levels of error (i.e., false negatives) that occur when many samples are drawn from a population whose evaluations show a true preference for prosocial agents.…”

Infants and toddlers leverage their understanding of action goals to evaluate agents who help others

“…The infants in these studies preferentially reached for and looked to agents whose actions brought about the goal states that the protagonist desired, by pushing the agent up a hill that it had struggled to climb, opening the box that it had struggled to open, or returning its ball (Margoni & Surian, 2018;Woo et al, 2022;cf. Schlingloff et al, 2020).…”

“…In these studies, infants viewed puppet show displays depicting protagonists who attempted to climb a hill (Hamlin et al, 2007, 2010), open a box containing a toy (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011; Steckler et al, 2017), or seek to recover a ball with which they had been playing (Hamlin & Wynn, 2011). The infants in these studies preferentially reached for and looked to agents whose actions brought about the goal states that the protagonist desired, by pushing the agent up a hill that it had struggled to climb, opening the box that it had struggled to open, or returning its ball (Margoni & Surian, 2018; Woo et al, 2022; cf. Schlingloff et al, 2020).…”

Infants infer potential social partners by observing the interactions of their parent with unknown others

“…The looking preference trial was followed by the critical reaching preference trial. Following the procedure of past studies of infant social evaluation ( 8 , 15 , 16 , 30 , 31 ), an experimenter who was unaware of the condition (imitation by mother vs. stranger) or of the particular puppet that the adult had imitated presented the real puppets to the infant, one in each hand, and asked, “Which one do you like?” We preregistered the prediction that infants would preferentially reach for the target of their own parent’s imitation. Indeed, most infants (11/14) reached for the puppet that their parent had imitated.…”

“…The home environments of the infants in the current sample likely include many representational toys, including puppets and dolls. Prior research shows that toddlers from this population are willing and able to treat puppets as social partners and interactions with puppets as socially meaningful events ( 14 , 30 ).…”