The study investigated interpretive understanding, moral judgments, and emotion attributions in relation to social behaviour in a sample of 59 5-year-old, 123 7-year-old, and 130 9-year-old children. Interpretive understanding was assessed by two tasks measuring children's understanding of ambiguous situations. Moral judgments and emotion attributions were measured using two moral rule transgre...

Increasing longevity and prevalence of long-term conditions contribute to older adults being the greatest users of health services. However, relatively little is known about the health and illness beliefs of the oldest old or how they decide to seek help in response to symptoms. Through analysis of in-depth interviews with day centre attendees aged 80-93, we find that a moral, hierarchical appr...

A vigorous research literature focused on early childhood conscience, prosocial behavior, and empathy— and also theory of mind, emotion understanding, and social cognition—has important implications for moral development theory. It offers a new understanding of the early conceptual, affective, and relational foundations of moral development. In addition, it provides the opportunity to create a ...

Highly distributed, loosely organized, independent, informal work organizations sometimes manage both joint efforts and collective welfare at least as well as centralized bureaucracies do. This aligns closely with the view that markets are superior to bureaucracies as ways of organizing both joint efforts and collective welfare. There are other forms of work organization between perfect markets...

Ethical disputes arise over differences in the content of the ethical beliefs people hold on either side of an issue. One person may believe that it is wrong to have an abortion for financial reasons, whereas another may believe it to be permissible. But, the magnitude and difficulty of such disputes may also depend on other properties of the ethical beliefs in question-in particular, how objec...

A large body of empirical studies shows that religion often serves as a factor promoting positive, healthy outcomes in the lives of American adolescents. Yet existing theoretical explanations for these religious effects remain largely disjointed and fragmented. This article attempts to formulate a more systematic, integrated, and coherent account of religion's constructive influence in the live...

Although governance is about interpersonal relationships, it appears that the antecedents and consequences of affective bonds (social ties) in social groups dealing with commonpool resources and public goods have been neglected. The welfare costs of the neglect of such bonds and their dynamic properties in economics are unclear but may be substantial. In this paper, I discuss a theoretical ‘dua...

Much moral skepticism stems from the charge that moral facts do not figure in causal explanations. However, philosophers committed to normative epistemological discourse (by which I mean our practice of evaluating beliefs as justified or unjustified, and so forth) are in no position to demand that normative facts serve such a role, since epistemic facts are causally impotent as well. I argue in...

What kind of evidence will lead people to revise their moral beliefs? Moral beliefs are often strongly held convictions, and existing research has shown that morality is rooted in emotion and socialization rather than deliberative reasoning. In addition, more general issues-such as confirmation bias-further impede coherent belief revision. Here, we explored a unique means for inducing belief re...