Roots and Branches of Right and Wrong: Three Insights from a Developmental Moral Psychology
This is a hybrid event.
Between morality’s infant roots and its adult branches, children transform their views about right and wrong. Humans are not born disagreeing about whether some provocations warrant a violent response, nor are they born agreeing that unprovoked violence is wrong: By adulthood, they do both. Despite the proliferation of studies on morality from infancy to adulthood in the past two decades, the field has witnessed a disconnect between studies on the moral development of children and studies on the moral psychology of adults. At a time when leading developmental psychologists proposed that reasoning guides the moral judgments of children, leading cognitive and social psychologists argued that reasoning rarely shapes the moral judgments of adults. To resolve such discrepancies, a developmental moral psychology is needed—one that incorporates psychological methods and findings across the lifespan. My presentation will discuss three empirical insights that instantiate a developmental moral psychology. This framework enables coherence within research on child and adult morality and, I will argue, promotes cross-paradigm collaborations in the study of why humans agree and disagree about right and wrong.

To join the talk on the day
us06web.zoom.us/j/82975812873?pwd=My92Z1BPRkd3dHpXY05oYnRJTUtnQT09

Meeting ID: 829 7581 2873
Passcode: 039594
Date: 5 December 2022, 14:00 (Monday, 9th week, Michaelmas 2022)
Venue: Seminar Room (2nd Floor), New Radcliffe House
Speaker: Dr Audun Dahl (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Organising department: Department of Experimental Psychology
Organiser contact email address: hod.office@psy.ox.ac.uk
Host: Robert Hepach (University of Oxford)
Part of: Departmental Seminar Series (Experimental Psychology)
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Regula Dent