In industrialized societies, adults exhibit stable preferences for the types of people, animals, and entities they feel moral concern for (Crimston et al., 2016). Only one published study to date has utilized the moral circles paradigm to examine these preferences in children, finding that as children age, their preferences shift to become more…

Young children from a very early age not only prefer those who help others but also those who engage in altruistic helping. This study aims to test how children assess helping when the goal of the helping behavior is immoral. We argue that younger children consider only the helping versus hindering behavior, but older children distinguish their…

Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both "endogenous" influences (the internal mental states of agents) and "exogenous" influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth,…

Young children show remarkably sophisticated abilities to evaluate others. Yet their abilities to engage in proportional moral evaluation undergoes protracted development. Namely, young children evaluate someone who shares "absolutely" more as being "nicer" than someone who shares "proportionally" more (e.g., sharing…

Previous research has shown that bilinguals respond differently to moral dilemmas posed in each of their languages, tending to make deontologically-based decisions (based on right or wrong) in their first language and utilitarian decisions (bringing about the most good) in their second language. In the present study, we tested several predictors…

This article examines relationships between children and youths' judgments and their justifications of truth telling and verbal deception, in situational and cultural contexts. Han Chinese, Euro-Canadians and Chinese-Canadians, seven- to 17-years of age were presented competitive scenarios in which protagonists told either lies to protect, or…

Research on the role of moral emotions in moral judgment, both in hypothetical dilemmas and in real-life moral decision making, has focused on preschool and elementary school age, with few studies spanning a larger age range, into adolescence and adulthood. The present special issue addresses a neglected area, the development of moral emotions and…

Although children enact third-party punishment, at least in response to harm and fairness violations, much remains unknown about this behavior. We investigated the tendency to make the punishment fit the crime in terms of moral domain; developmental patterns across moral domains; the effects of audience and descriptive norm violations; and…

Here, we present a strong test of the hypothesis that sacrificial moral dilemmas are solved using the same value-based decision mechanism that operates on decisions concerning economic goods. To test this hypothesis, we developed Psychological Value Theory. Psychological Value Theory is an expansion and generalization of Cohen and Ahn's (2016)…

This study focused on the ethical intentions and perceptions of ethical problems among undergraduates in Singapore. An online survey was conducted to a sample of 100 undergraduates studying in local and foreign universities based in Singapore. The study found influences on ethical perceptions and intentions by factors such as gender, religious…

Adults conceptualize God as particularly knowledgeable -- more knowledgeable than humans -- about moral transgressions. We investigated how younger (4- to 5-year-old) and older (6- to 7-year-old) children view God's moral knowledge. Cultural narratives in the United States portray God as omniscient, which could lead children growing up in the…

In this study on motivations concerning professional development (PD) we interviewed 95 primary school teachers in the Netherlands. We coded these data using the Unified Model of Task-specific Motivation (de Brabander & Martens, 2014) in different decision contexts concerning who decides about teacher participation in PD: school board, teacher…

Children's evaluations of necessary harm (acts intended to prevent a greater harm) and how "maternal disapproval" and "peer relationship" play roles in this context were examined. A total of 120 children at 6, 9, and 12 years of age evaluated scenarios depicting prototypic and necessary (physical or verbal) harm. When a mother…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences on 4-8 year-olds' and adults' moral judgments. In both, participants were told stories from previous studies that had indicated that children's judgments are largely outcome-based. Building on recent research in which one change to these studies' methods resulted in substantially more…

The current study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in the developmental origins of children's intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity. To this end, we compared how German and Chinese children interpret and react to antisocial and prosocial interactions between puppets. An actor puppet…