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Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering

Inderpreet K Gill1, Jessica A Sommerville1

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Frontiers in Psychology
|August 7, 2023
PubMed

Insights

Infants use past actions to predict future moral behavior. Early exposure to helping or hindering influences expectations of fairness and aid, demonstrating developing moral reasoning in toddlers.

Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Moral Psychology
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Infants' understanding of moral concepts like fairness and harm is crucial for social development.
  • Prior research suggests infants can distinguish between helpful and hindering actions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate if infants (14-27 months) form expectations about future moral behavior based on an agent's prior actions.
  • To examine how infants integrate information across moral sub-domains (fairness, help/harm).

Main Methods:

  • Two experiments were conducted with infants aged 14-27 months.
  • Infants were familiarized with agents exhibiting helping/hindering and fair/unfair behaviors.
  • Infants' looking times were measured to assess their expectations of subsequent actions.

Main Results:

  • Infants familiarized with helping expected fairness, while those familiarized with hindering showed no preference, suggesting suspended fairness expectations.
  • Infants familiarized with unfair behavior expected hindering, indicating a transfer of expectations across moral domains.
  • Expectation formation was more pronounced following exposure to hindering and unfair distributions.

Conclusions:

  • Infants utilize prior moral behavior to predict future actions, even across different moral sub-domains.
  • This suggests early evidence of consilience within the moral domain by the second year of life.
  • The findings highlight the nuanced development of moral reasoning in early childhood.

Keywords:
fairnessinfants (birth to 2 years)moral developmentmoral judgmenttrait inference

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