nChildren's moral judgments of resource distributions as having "fair" or "unfair" origins play an important role in early social cognition. What factors shape these judgments? The present study advances research on this question in two primary ways: First, while prior work has typically assigned children to an advantaged or…

Research on moral socialization has largely focused on the role of direct communication and has almost completely ignored a potentially rich source of social influence: evaluative comments that children overhear. We examined for the first time whether overheard comments can shape children's moral behavior. Three- and 5-year-old children (N = 200)…

Middle childhood seems to be crucial for the emergence of a moral identity, that is, an evaluative stance of how important it is for someone's sense of self to be moral. This study investigates the effects of moral identity on the neural processing of moral content in 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with scenes portraying…

For millennia, adults have told children stories not only to entertain but also to impart important moral lessons to promote prosocial behaviors. Many such stories contain anthropomorphized animals because it is believed that children learn from anthropomorphic stories as effectively, if not better than, from stories with human characters, and…

In three experiments involving 207 preschoolers and 28 adults, we investigated the extent to which young children base moral judgments of actions aimed to protect others on utilitarian principles. When asked to judge the rightness of intervening to hurt one person in order to save five others, the large majority of children aged 3 to 5 years…

Empathy and sympathy play crucial roles in much of human social interaction and are necessary components for healthy coexistence. Sympathy is thought to be a proxy for motivating prosocial behavior and providing the affective and motivational base for moral development. The purpose of the present study was to use functional MRI to characterize…