Moral Reasoning, Emotions, Motivations, Biases, Intuitions, and Their Interplay as Determinants of Moral Behaviour During Development

Research in the field of morality has traditionally focused on the role of moral reasoning, and only later has extended to also focus on other moral cognitions and the complex role of emotions. Over time, a number of moral cognitions, such as self-serving cognitive distortions and moral disengagement, proved to have an important role, while research predominantly focused on empathy-related responding turned to integrate various other-oriented and self-conscious moral emotions. In the last two decades, intuitionist models of moral judgment introduced an important change in perspective giving moral intuitions a central role as antecedents of moral judgment. Most radical perspectives claimed that intuitions directly lead to moral judgments and that reasoning is only a post-hoc rationalization, while other perspectives assigned intuitions a central role only in situations evoking a dominant, negative emotional response. Finally, research conducted in the last 15 years demonstrated that pre-verbal infants and toddlers, despite their very young age, seem to possess complex socio-moral intuitions and reasoning abilities.

Although intuitionist models have generated important work, they have been mostly concerned with explaining moral judgment, somehow disregarding a proper study of the determinants of moral behaviour. On the other hand, even though research in the field of moral development and moral behaviour has considered a wide range of variables over time, until recently these variables have largely been treated as separate entities. Only over the past decade, integrative perspectives on moral development have proposed to combine different facets of morality, such as reasoning, motives, intuitions and emotions or constructs stemming from different approaches into more complex and comprehensive theoretical frameworks. Therefore, more research is needed to integrate different perspectives and test more complex and multifaceted explanations of moral behaviour. Moreover, new studies should try to shed light on the link between moral intuitions and behaviour and on the interplay between moral intuitions and other moral variables.

This Research Topic aims to fill these gaps by collecting articles that investigate how moral intuitions affect behaviour, and how moral cognitions, emotions, and/or intuitions work together to determine moral behaviour during development. Manuscripts submitted in this Research Topic should focus on both:
i) moral intuitions or the interplay between moral cognitions, emotions and/or intuitions;
ii) the explanation of moral behaviour during development.

Moreover, all the contributions should have a clear developmental perspective, presenting results from longitudinal samples, comparing different age groups, or discussing results in light of the age-related specificities of the sample. Manuscripts can focus on infancy, toddlerhood, childhood and/or adolescence and can be systematic reviews of the literature or opinion papers, as well as original studies or brief reports, presenting results from samples of participants with typical as well as atypical development.

Keywords: Morality, moral cognitions, moral reasoning, emotions, motivation, biases, moral intuitions, antisocial behaviour, prosocial behaviour, infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.