The origins of moral sensitivities: Probing infants' expectations, evaluations, generalization, and enforcement of
1Department of Psychology, The University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Insights
This study reveals that infants develop moral expectations and evaluations by their second year, driven by daily experiences. Early moral enforcement differs significantly from later childhood, lacking punishment.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Moral Psychology
- Infant Cognition
Background:
- Understanding the origins of morality in early development is challenging due to infants' limited behavioral expression.
- Existing research often struggles to disentangle innate moral capacities from learned behaviors.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the emergence of moral sensitivities in infancy and early childhood.
- To analyze the components of moral responses, including expectations, evaluations, generalization, and enforcement.
- To differentiate infant moral responses from those observed in later childhood.
Main Methods:
- A multi-pronged, multi-method approach was employed to dissect the moral response.
- Detailed observation and analysis of infant behavior in the second year of life.
- Comparative analysis of moral response components across developmental stages.
Main Results:
- Many moral sensitivities, including expectations and evaluations, emerge by the second year of life.
- These early moral sensitivities are closely linked to and likely influenced by infants' everyday experiences.
- A key qualitative difference is the absence of punishment as an enforcement mechanism in infancy compared to later childhood.
Conclusions:
- Early moral development is significantly shaped by environmental experiences.
- Infant moral cognition exhibits distinct characteristics, particularly in behavioral enforcement.
- Further research is needed to understand causal inputs, the distinction between moral and social cognition, and the morality-cognition-behavior gap.
Abstract:
Identifying the origins of moral sensitivities, and their elaboration, within infancy and early childhood is a challenging task, given inherent limitations in infants' behavior. Here, I argue for a multi-pronged, multi-method approach that involves cleaving the moral response at its joints. Specifically, I chart the emergence of infants' moral expectations, evaluations, generalization and enforcement, demonstrating that while many moral sensitivities are present in the second year of life, these sensitivities are closely aligned with, and likely driven by, infants' everyday experience. Moreover, qualitative differences exist between the moral responses that are present in infancy and those of later childhood, particularly in terms of enforcement (i.e., a lack of punishment in infancy). These findings set the stage for addressing outstanding critical questions regarding moral development, that include identifying discrete causal inputs to early moral cognition, identifying whether moral cognition is distinct from social cognition early in life, and explaining gaps that exist between moral cognition and moral behavior in development.
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