Mental State Understanding and Moral Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

As adults, we readily reason about others’ goals, intentions, beliefs, and character. The present symposium asks: How do we come to understand others’ minds, and how does this understanding inform how we navigate the social world?
Paper 1 builds on a body of literature that has found that infants prefer helpers over hinderers, and asks how infants form these evaluations. The present eye-tracking experiments provide evidence that the more infants attend to a protagonist’s location-based goal, the more infants positively evaluate individuals who help that protagonist.
Papers 2 and 3 concern a host of research that has demonstrated that young children’s moral evaluations privilege outcomes over mental states. Paper 2 proposes that this developmental shift is due to changes in executive function, and shows that young children and autistic children can consider others’ intentions when cognitive demands are low. Paper 3 provides evidence that 15-month-old infants engage in mentalistic, belief-based evaluation, even when others’ beliefs are false.
Paper 4 provides evidence that different kinds of moral behavior are integrated in children’s minds, and finds that 4- to 7-year-old children are surprised: when someone who is fair is later unhelpful to others; and when someone who is unfair is later helpful to others.
Overall, these papers illustrate the interconnections between mental state understanding and moral cognition across development with a diverse set of measures. We demonstrate that an understanding of others’ goals, intentions, beliefs, and dispositions is critical to how children understand social actions, form social evaluations, and predict others’ behavior.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Brandon Matthew Woo, Harvard University

Individual Presentations

• The Role of Goal Understanding in Infants’ Evaluation of Helping and Hindering Actions - Presenting Author: Enda Tan, University of Maryland - College Park; Non-Presenting Author: J. Kiley Hamlin, University of British Columbia (UBC)

• Conceptual Continuity in the Development of Intent-Based Moral Judgment - Presenting Author: Francesco Margoni, Universitetet i Stavanger; Non-Presenting Author: Luca Surian, University of Trento

• Belief-Based Evaluations of Helping in 15-Month-Old Infants - Presenting Author: Brandon Matthew Woo, Harvard University; Non-Presenting Author: Elizabeth S. Spelke, Harvard University

• Children’s Inferences of Moral Character Across Different Moral Sub-Domains - Presenting Author: Inderpreet Kaur Gill, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Aisling Curtin, University of Toronto; Non-Presenting Author: Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto