Infants' And Young Children'S Preferences For Prosocial Over Antisocial Others

The nature of moral judgments is continuously debated by developmental psychologists. For instance, are moral judgments reason-based and/or emotion-based, and to what extent are moral judgments experience-dependent versus experience-independent? This paper discusses how methodological concerns impact the investigation of moral judgments and provides an emotion-based intuitive definition of morality that encourages the empirical exploration of whether moral evaluations emerge in the absence of relevant experience and before complex reasoning abilities arise. Evidence is reviewed suggesting that preverbal infants evaluate third parties based on their morally relevant acts, positively evaluating prosocial others and negatively evaluating antisocial others. Several unanswered questions are considered, including to what extent infants' evaluations are rooted in emotion and whether they distinguish social versus moral concerns. (C) 2018 S. Karger AG, Basel