Department of Psychology, The University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Adv Child Dev Behav. 2024;67:31-69. doi: 10.1016/bs.acdb.2024.07.007. Epub 2024 Sep 2.
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.
在婴儿期和幼儿期识别道德敏感性的起源及其发展是一项具有挑战性的任务，因为婴儿的行为存在固有局限性。在这里，我主张采取一种多管齐下、多方法的方法，将道德反应从其关节处切开。具体来说，我描述了婴儿道德期望、评价、概括和执行的出现，表明虽然许多道德敏感性在生命的第二年就存在，但这些敏感性与婴儿的日常经验密切相关，并且可能是由其驱动的。此外，婴儿期和后期儿童期存在的道德反应存在质的差异，特别是在执行方面（即婴儿期缺乏惩罚）。这些发现为解决有关道德发展的关键问题奠定了基础，包括确定早期道德认知的离散因果输入，确定生命早期道德认知是否与社会认知不同，以及解释道德认知与发展中的道德行为之间存在的差距。
