ABSTRACT
Despite the many differences that exist between cultures, cross-cultural research has revealed striking similarities in the behaviors that people consider morally right versus wrong. Where does this largely shared sense of morality come from? The present chapter argues that developmental precursors to this moral sense emerge in infancy. Specifically, this review highlights three moral domains (helping and harming, fairness, and group loyalty) that infants appear sensitive to. Within each of these three domains, infants evaluate others on the basis of their morally relevant behaviors and form expectations of these behaviors. We examine the nature of these evaluations and expectations, addressing how infants generate these evaluations and expectations and also the breadth and depth of infants’ understanding. Our review provides evidence in support of a moral core in infancy: early-emerging capacities to understand and evaluate morally relevant behaviors. We call on future work to examine how learning and active experience build on this moral core, overcome the limits of the core, and give rise to the full-fledged moral reasoning observed in older children and adults.
