Children Morally Prioritize Humans Over Animals Less Than Adults Do

• In Event: Who Deserves Moral Concern? The Perception of Humanity and Its Role in Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Adults care more about other people than they do about nonhuman animals. Many of us eat cows and pigs, for instance, while few would approve of raising humans as food. This is sometimes referred to as speciesism—that is, the tendency to ascribe moral priority to humans (over animals) on species grounds. The concept of speciesism (e.g. Singer, 1971) is well established in philosophy and, in recent years, has gained attention in psychology (e.g. Caviola et al., 2019). But, to date, no research has explored the emergence of this bias across development. In this research, we examine how children value the lives of animals compared to the lives of humans.
Across two preregistered experiments (N = 622), we tested adults and children aged 5-9 years using a forced choice rescue dilemma. In these dilemmas, subjects were told that two boats were sinking and that they could only choose to save one boat. We varied the numbers of humans, dogs, and pigs on each boat (1, 2, 10, 100). Across 18 dilemmas, children were asked to choose between saving the human/s or animal/s. They were also given the option to select “Can’t decide”. In Experiment 1, we asked children who they would choose to save. In Experiment 2, we introduced children to a character, Mr X, “who always does the right thing” and asked them who they thought Mr X would save. This enabled us to see if children distinguish between their personal preference and what they think is morally right.
Results reveal that, as expected, adults are highly speciesist, prioritizing humans over large numbers of animals. Surprisingly, though, children are less human-centric in their ascriptions of moral worth, often choosing to save the animals. To put it in numbers, while children valued the life of a human about 1.5 times as much as the lives of dogs and about 6 times as much as the lives of pigs, adults valued the life of a human at least 100 times as much as the lives of dogs and pigs, if not much more. There were no age effects in the developmental sample, suggesting that our strong tendency to morally prioritize humans does not emerge until at least early adolescence.
Notably, this pattern of results persists regardless of whether children are asked about their preferences (Exp 1) or what they think is the right thing to do (Exp 2). Data from control conditions (e.g., choosing between saving one person versus ten plates) suggest that children are understanding the task, and not merely choosing the largest number. Our findings suggest that our human-centric moral preferences are not a natural default, but rather emerge over the course of development.

Authors

• Matti Wilks, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Lucius Caviola, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Guy Kahane, University of Oxford
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul Bloom, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author