Children's developing metaethical judgments.
Abstract
Human adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically
if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children
(N=136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge
(e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging
that it is okay to do X). We assessed children's metaethical judgment, that is, whether
they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could be
right. We found that 9-year-olds, but not younger children, were more likely to judge
that both parties could be right when a normative ingroup judge disagreed with an
antinormative extraterrestrial judge (with different preferences and background) than
when the antinormative judge was another ingroup individual. This effect was not found
in a comparison case where parties disagreed about the possibility of different physical
laws. These findings suggest that although young children often exhibit moral objectivism,
by early school age they begin to temper their objectivism with culturally relative
metaethical judgments.
Type
Journal articleSubject
Metaethical judgmentMoral development
Moral disagreement
Moral objectivism
Moral relativism
Morality
Normative reasoning
Second-order judgment
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15401Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.jecp.2017.07.008Publication Info
Schmidt, Marco FH; Gonzalez-Cabrera, Ivan; & Tomasello, Michael (2017). Children's developing metaethical judgments. J Exp Child Psychol, 164. pp. 163-177. 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.07.008. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/15401.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Michael Tomasello
James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor
Major research interests in processes of social cognition, social learning, cooperation,
and communication from developmental, comparative, and cultural perspectives. Current
theoretical focus on processes of shared intentionality. Empirical research mainly
with human children from 1 to 4 years of age and great apes.

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