The Developmental Roots of Sociomoral Cognition

Moral cognition is fundamental to humans’ social competence, including the ability to engage in complex cooperative activities. Prohibitions on inflicting unjustified harm and treating others unfairly are central aspects of that competence. Explaining how such prohibitions arise in children has been a central focus of developmental research since Piaget’s seminal work on moral judgment, but only recently have developmental scientists tried to also unveil infants’ sociomoral competence. In the past two decades, this field has rapidly accumulated experimental studies yielding many groundbreaking results. Infants’ expectations, preferences and even active interventions seem to reveal early emerging sociomoral skills and concepts.

While these results are certainly of great value for any account of how moral judgements develop in the human mind, their significance and theoretical implications are still highly controversial. Controversies concern long-lasting disagreements on what constitutes moral knowledge and moral judgments, whether they differ from other types of knowledge and judgments (conventional, prudential), what counts as clear evidence that a moral judgment or evaluation has been generated, and whether and how they can be studied in preverbal or non-verbal organisms. Current main theoretical accounts also disagree on whether children rely on a domain-specific ‘moral core’ to bootstrap their evaluation skills or, rather, they exclusively rely on domain-general statistical learning and constructivist mechanisms.

This Research Topic welcomes new empirical studies investigating these issues, including infants’ or toddlers’ ability to generate sociomoral evaluations and the processing mechanisms underpinning such abilities. We particularly invite cross-cultural infant studies on this topic and experimental evidence from non-WEIRD societies will be regarded as a highly valuable contribution.

We are particularly interested in (but not limited to) the following themes:

o Empirical studies on infants’ and toddlers’ sociomoral evaluations
o Cross-cultural perspectives on moral development in infancy
o Experimental evidence from non-WEIRD societies
o Theoretical reflections on core issues in moral cognition
o Mechanisms (e.g., domain-specific vs. domain-general learning) underlying sociomoral development.

Submissions can take the form of Original Research, Brief Research Reports, Reviews, Perspectives, or Opinions. We also encourage integrative or critical discussions of previous findings and theoretical frameworks.

Keywords: Infancy, Sociomoral cognition, Moral development, Fairness, Harm, Cross-cultural, Toddlerhood

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.