Caring for one’s family often feels effortless, while extending care to distant others can feel considerably more challenging. Diverse religious traditions address this by teaching that individuals should not only care for close others but also embrace a sense of impartial beneficence, a universal approach to caring for those who are distant, dissimilar, or deviant.
Determining if, when, and how we extend moral concern beyond our family not only has implications for theology but also for our understanding of important virtues, such as love, empathy, forgiveness, compassion, and generosity. Despite the importance of extending moral concern to distant others, we know little about humans’ capacity to do so or the mechanisms that support the expansion of moral concern.
To address these open questions, our project will examine the development of moral concern, focusing on the factors that shape it. We will implement tasks where children around the world make social judgments and incentivized decisions about helping different entities (e.g., family members, outgroup members, and animals), while also measuring theoretically-relevant developmental, cognitive, and sociocultural variables.
Outputs include 6-12 peer-reviewed articles, a preconference, a capstone meeting, and dissemination of key findings to the scientific community via professional conferences and to the broader community via a YouTube channel titled Psychology Playground. This work will provide theoretically important and practically significant insights into how we can maintain a broad sense of moral concern beyond childhood.
