ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a brief overview of foundational work examining young children’s explicit moral judgments and then summarizes a growing body of evidence that preverbal infants also make complex evaluations regarding others’ prosocial and antisocial behavior: Infants’ implicit evaluations are sensitive to the mental states of helpers and hinderers and the previous behavior of those being helped and hindered and can privilege moral value over their own self-interest. The chapter ends with a discussion of whether infants’ evaluations reflect personal, social, and/or moral concerns.