The development of cooperation and morality

Moral Development

Contact: Nils Schuhmacher, Niklas Dworazik, Eva-Maria Schiller, Joscha Kärtner

Although children show prosocial behavior around one year of age, it is not before preschool years that children increasingly internalize social and moral norms and standards and that their prosocial activities are increasingly motivated by these norms. In this line of reserach, we focus on children’s moral development during preschool years and later on (i.e., 4 to 14 years of age). In different studies we try to answer the following set of research questions:

  1. When do children start to internalize moral norms and correspondingly act on the basis of these norms and also expect others to stick to moral rules (preschool age: 4-6 years)?
  2. Which role plays socio-cultural milieus children grow up in for early moral development (preschool age: 4-6 years)?
  3. Do preschoolers differently evaluate moral transgression conducted by ingroup members compared to outgroup members?
  4. Which factors determine how children decide when they get involved in dilemma situations? Are children’s moral intuitions in dilemma situations similar to those of adults? Are the moral intuitions of children linked to those of their mothers?
  5. How is the development of moral emotions related to antisocial behavior (i.e., bullying) in adolescents (i.e., 12- to 14-years-olds)?

In a recent study (see research question 1) we investigated the relations between preschoolers’ developing moral motivation, prosocial behavior and their expectations towards others (im)moral behavior (N = 51; 4 to 6 years of age). We found a significant age effect for preschoolers’ moral motivation and their expectations towards other’s moral behavior. In addition, there was a coherent pattern of correlations: Children’s moral motivation was associated (a) with their own prosocial behavior and (b) their predictions/expectations towards other’s moral behavior. In summary, these findings indicate that children develop an integrated moral system during preschool years.

In another study (see research question 2; see also folk psychology) we compared children’s action predictions for protagonists in different duty-desire conflict stories between preschoolers from urban and rural contexts. We found that rural preschoolers (n = 46) predominantly expected others to fulfill duties (i.e., act in accordance to moral and social norms). Older urban preschoolers, in contrast, predicted others’ behavior based on the fulfillment of personal desires. In sum, the data suggest that differential patterns in children’s action prediction emerge during the preschool years, which hints at differences in how duties and desires are accentuated in children’s folk theories of human behavior.

In a third study (see research question 3) we found that four- to six-year-old’s social evaluation (i.e., explicit liking for & sharing with a puppet) was robustly biased by information on both social (i.e., group membership) and moral status, that is, preschoolers robustly favored in-group over out-group members and prosocial over antisocial agents. However, explicit moral evaluations depended on moral status information only, that is, preschoolers equally condemned moral transgressions (i.e., harming another person) and equally advocated prosocial acts (i.e., helping another person), no matter whether these acts were conducted by an in-group or an out-group member. In summary, these results support a moral impartiality assumption, that is, preschool aged children understand and enforce moral norms impartially. Nonetheless, our findings also point to the fact that group membership plays an important role in preschoolers’ social evaluation of others, that is, even in the presence of conflicting information regarding others’ moral integrity.

Selected publications:

  • Dworazik, N., & Rusch, H. (2014). A brief history of experimental ethics. Experimental ethics (pp. 38-56) Springer.
  • Kärtner, J. & Schuhmacher, N. (2014). Folk models of human behavior and sociocognitive development. ISSBD Bulletin, 66, 6-8.