AUTHOR=Carpendale Jeremy I. M. , Wallbridge Beau 

TITLE=From action to ethics: A process-relational approach to prosocial development

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1059646

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1059646

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Explaining how children become active prosocial and moral agents requires, we argue, beginning with action and interaction with others. We take a process-relational perspective and draw on developmental systems theory in arguing that infants cannot be born knowing about morality or anything else. Instead, they are born with emerging abilities to do things, to act and react. Their biological embodiment links them to their environment and creates their social environment in which they develop. A clear distinction between biological and social levels cannot be made in the context of ongoing development because they are thoroughly interwoven in a bidirectional system in which they mutually create each other. We focus on infants’ emerging ability to interact and develop within a human developmental system, and prosociality and morality emerge at the level of interaction. Caring is a constitutive aspect of the forms of experience in which infants are embedded in the process of becoming persons. Infants are immersed a world of mutual responsiveness, within caring relationships that is infused with concern, interest, and enjoyment. In such a developmental system, infants become persons through being treated as persons.