Mothers’ Insistence when Prohibiting Infants from Harming Others in Everyday Interactions

Dahl, Audun

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01448

Cited by 21 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 56 publications

(112 reference statements)

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“…Indeed, evidence suggests that even toddlers react negatively to acts that adults deem morally wrong. For example, toddlers display heightened emotional reactions to moral violations compared to conventional ones [Smetana, 1984] and from 14 months of age are more likely to immediately comply and less likely to protest when caregivers intervene on their moral versus conventional transgressions [Dahl, 2016a]. Together, these results suggest that young children make domain distinctions and are sensitive to the obligatory nature of moral rules prior to the emergence of explicit reasoning skills [see also Helwig, 2008].…”

Section: Defining Moralitymentioning

confidence: 63%

“…Researchers who adopt an experience-dependent view of moral development have posited that toddlers' selective moral reactions result from experiences in the social world that have alerted them to the fact that certain acts are good or bad, and/or allowed them to construct the distinction between moral versus nonmoral concerns. For instance, within the first 2 years of life, caregivers respond differentially to toddlers' moral transgressions (e.g., hitting) versus their conventional transgression (e.g., making a mess): moral transgressions are more likely to inspire caregivers' physical interventions, direct commands, angry tones of voice, verbal references to consequences for victims, and are less likely to result in compromises or use of distractions [Dahl, 2016a;; see also Smetana, 1989;Nucci & Turiel, 1978]. Caregivers' responses even distinguish the severity of toddlers' moral transgressions, by responding more negatively to toddlers' unprovoked acts of force compared to their provoked or accidental moral violations [Dahl, 2016b].…”

Section: Defining Moralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Infants’ and Young Children’s Preferences for Prosocial over Antisocial Others

Hamlin¹,

Vondervoort²

2018

Human Development

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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.

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Section: Defining Moralitymentioning

confidence: 63%

Section: Defining Moralitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Infants’ and Young Children’s Preferences for Prosocial over Antisocial Others

Hamlin¹,

Vondervoort²

2018

Human Development

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“…The constructivist view does not seek to separate innate and learned elements of morality ( Piaget, 1932 ). This view is also supported by evidence that children have an abundance of morally relevant experience from early in life, involving helping and being helped as well as harming and being harmed ( Reddy et al, 2013 ; Dahl, 2015 , 2016a , b ; Hammond et al, 2017 ). Through these experiences, children come to critically evaluate norms from parents and others ( Dahl and Kim, 2014 ; Dahl, 2016b ; Dahl and Killen, 2018 ).…”

Section: Early Morality Is Constructed and Is Neither Innate Nor Leamentioning

confidence: 90%

A Developmental Perspective on the Origins of Morality in Infancy and Early Childhood

Dahl

Killen

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Key constituents of morality emerge during the first 4 years of life. Recent research with infants and toddlers holds a promise to explain the origins of human morality. This article takes a constructivist approach to the acquisition of morality, and makes three main proposals. First, research on moral development needs an explicit definition of morality. Definitions are crucial for scholarly communication and for settling empirical questions. Second, researchers would benefit from eschewing the dichotomy between innate and learned explanations of morality. Based on work on developmental biology, we propose that all developmental transitions involve both genetic and environmental factors. Third, attention is needed to developmental changes, alongside continuities, in the development of morality from infancy through childhood. Although infants and toddlers show behaviors that resemble the morally relevant behaviors of older children and adults, they do not judge acts as morally right or wrong until later in childhood. We illustrate these points by discussing the development of two phenomena central to morality: Orientations toward helping others and developing concepts of social equality. We assert that a constructivist approach will help to bridge research on infants and toddlers with research on moral developmental later in childhood and into adulthood.

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“…In early triadic interactions, infants not only develop an understanding of normativity, but of language, too (Tomasello, ; Tomasello, Mannle, & Kruger, )—which is itself a normative construct (Brandom, ). Adults’ use of both normative (e.g., deontic terms, such as “wrong,” “must”) and non‐normative language in everyday interactions is important for infants’ developing understanding of normativity given that any language use is subject, and often points, to norms and thus helps infants to learn about (different types of) norms and share meaning with others (Dahl, ; Dahl & Tran, ; Nelson, ; Rakoczy & Tomasello, ; Smetana & Braeges, ; Smetana et al., ). More generally, the interrelation between language development, shared intentionality, and normativity is reciprocal (Lamm, ; Rakoczy, ).…”

Section: Force Coming From the Collective “We”: Impersonal Normativitmentioning

confidence: 99%

Eighteen‐Month‐Old Infants Correct Non‐Conforming Actions by Others

Schmidt¹,

Rakoczy

Tomasello

2019

Infancy

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At around their third birthday, children begin to enforce social norms on others impersonally, often using generic normative language, but little is known about the developmental building blocks of this abstract norm understanding. Here, we investigate whether even toddlers show signs of enforcing on others interpersonally how “we” do things. In an initial dyad, 18‐month‐old infants learnt a simple game‐like action from an adult. In two experiments, the adult either engaged infants in a normative interactive activity (stressing that this is the way “we” do it) or, as a non‐normative control, marked the same action as idiosyncratic, based on individual preference. In a test dyad, infants had the opportunity to spontaneously intervene when a puppet partner performed an alternative action. Infants intervened, corrected, and directed the puppet more in the normative than in the non‐normative conditions. These findings suggest that, during the second year of life, infants develop second‐personal normative expectations about their partner's behavior (“You should do X!”) in social interactions, thus making an important step toward understanding the normative structure of human cultural activities. These simple normative expectations will later be scaled up to group‐minded and abstract social norms.

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Mothers’ Insistence when Prohibiting Infants from Harming Others in Everyday Interactions

Cited by 21 publications

References 56 publications

Infants’ and Young Children’s Preferences for Prosocial over Antisocial Others

Infants’ and Young Children’s Preferences for Prosocial over Antisocial Others

A Developmental Perspective on the Origins of Morality in Infancy and Early Childhood

Eighteen‐Month‐Old Infants Correct Non‐Conforming Actions by Others

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