The development of speciesism: Children’s and adolescents’ moral cognition regarding animals and the natural world

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Humans face an unprecedented environmental crisis that presents us with many moral questions – how should we treat non-human animals? How important is it to defend the natural world? Today’s youth will confront these issues head-on, which often present a conflict between moral concern (i.e., not to harm other living beings) with social conventions (i.e., currently most people eat meat). Adults use a variety of psychological mechanisms to overcome such conflicts, but so far little is known about the emergence of such processes in childhood and adolescence. This symposium brings together four papers representing some of the first empirical examinations of youth’s thinking about the natural world. In the first paper, the authors demonstrate that with age, children in India and Germany increasingly view humans as part of the animal kingdom. In a second paper, the authors demonstrate that U.S. children make fundamental errors in understanding the origins of animal-based food products. In a third paper, children from the UK perceive eating animals to be less acceptable than adults, regardless of the intelligence of the animal. Finally, a fourth paper demonstrates that adolescents in the UK are more likely than adults to perceive eating animals as morally permissible and use less reference to animal welfare to justify this. Together these papers document an early focus on animal wellbeing and nature that incorporates animal and human lives in one moral circle giving way to a reduced concern in adolescence as knowledge structures change, with implications for environmental education across the lifespan.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Luke McGuire, University Of Exeter

Individual Presentations

• The development of German and Indian children’s ecological reasoning - Presenting Author: Katja Liebal

• Children’s knowledge of and attitudes toward animal-based foods. - Presenting Author: Erin R Hahn, Furman University

• Children are less self-serving than adults in their concern for the animals we eat - Presenting Author: Heather Henseler-Kozachenko; Jared Piazza

• Perceptions of treating and eating animals among adolescents - Presenting Author: Luke McGuire, University Of Exeter; Emma Fry; Nadira Faber