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

Abstract

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.

Prosociality and morality through the lens of personality psychology

“…Our aim in this review was to highlight some of the ways that personality psychology has contributed to our understanding of prosociality and morality. Of course, such other‐regarding tendencies are also shaped by social, cultural, and other contextual forces (e.g., Graham, Meindl, Beall, Johnson, & Zhang, ), and manifest differently throughout development and across the lifespan (e.g., Hubbard et al, ; Neldner, Crimston, Wilks, Redshaw, & Nielsen, ). Nevertheless, one of the most salient features of these tendencies is variation between individuals , and comprehensive models of prosociality and morality must therefore account for this variation.…”

Moral expansiveness short form: Validity and reliability of the MESx

“…Even though the reduced association with political orientation means the MESx might provide a cleaner measure of moral expansiveness, the complete scale is arguably better suited to fully capture the nuanced and multifaceted nature of moral boundary decision-making. Rather, the MESx should be viewed as part of a suite of tools for examining moral expansiveness: the shortened scale for resource-constrained researchers, the complete scale for those who are focused on observing nuances within the moral circle, and the adapted version designed to assess morally expansive decision-making throughout development [ 25 ].…”

Children Prioritize Humans Over Animals Less Than Adults Do

“…Additionally, we hypothesized that both adults and children have a stronger tendency to prioritize humans over pigs than over dogs because they value dogs—a companion animal—more than pigs—a food animal (Bastian, Loughnan, Haslam, & Radke, 2012; Bratanova, Loughnan, & Bastian, 2011; Loughnan, Haslam, & Bastian, 2010). Finally, following past research (Neldner et al, 2018), we hypothesized that children’s tendency to prioritize humans over animals increases with age.…”

“…Of the few studies that have explored children’s attitudes toward animals (see Melson, 2013), only two have systematically investigated these intuitions in a developmental context. One study found that 4- to 10-year-old children cared about an increasingly broad range of entities, including animals, as they grew older, but they generally cared most for humans (Neldner, Crimston, Wilks, Redshaw, & Nielsen, 2018). Another study tracked how 4- to 10-year-old children perceived the moral worth of a range of living, nonliving, and artificial entities, including a dog and a child (Sommer et al, 2019), and found that children thought it was equally wrong to cause physical harm to a dog and a child, but they also thought that it was more wrong to give away a child than a dog.…”