Mapping the origins of the human moral sense

Research suggests that the foundations for our sense of morality might be found in infancy. For instance, preverbal infants demonstrate behaviours which appear to be based on rudimentary moral principles - they evaluate others’ prosocial/antisocial actions, demonstrate an expectation for fair resource allocation, and exhibit concern for others’ distress. The purpose of the present research was to examine the moral relevance of these behaviours by examining concurrent and longitudinal associations among them. Additionally, we explored whether these behaviours are the product of social or domain-general processes, by assessing their relationship with a number of classic social and general cognitive measures. Participants were drawn from a longitudinal project which followed infants’ development from birth to age three (target N = 500). Studies were administered during the first 5 visits of the project (between birth and 12 months old), with one additional online study administered at 21 months old. We did not find any of the anticipated relationships among proposed moral behaviours, which might suggest that they are not the product of a coherent moral sense. However, we also did not find any associations with our social or domain-general variables, leaving questions about the nature of infants’ sociomoral behaviours largely unanswered. Importantly, we were also not able to replicate the majority of classic studies we administered across visits, which might reflect the susceptibility of infants’ responses to situational variables. Features of our testing sessions and the implications of the Covid-19 pandemic may have contributed to null-findings and attenuated effects that emerged in this research project.