This study analyzed the relations of two dimensions of moral cognition (i.e., acceptance of moral transgression and moral disengagement) and two forms of status in the peer group (i.e., social preference and perceived popularity) with bullying and defending among 235 primary-school children and 305 middle-school early adolescents. Social status was tested as a moderator of the associations betw...

Does sharing moral values encourage people to connect and form communities? The importance of moral homophily (love of same) has been recognized by social scientists, but the types of moral similarities that drive this phenomenon are still unknown. In this talk, I will present a series of experiments (both large-scale, observational social-media analyses and behavioral lab experiments) that inv...

The majority of theoretical models have defined stigma as occurring psychologically and limit its negative effects to individual processes. This paper, via an analysis of how 'face' is embodied in China, deepens an articulation of how the social aspects of stigma might incorporate the moral standing of both individual and collective actors defined within a local context. We illustrate (1) how o...

Abstract A consensus seems to be emerging in economics that at least three motives are at work in many strategic decisions: distributive preferences, reciprocal preferences and self-interest. An important obstacle to this research, however, has been moral biases, i.e., the distortions created by self-interest that can obscure our measures of social preferences. Among other things, this has led ...

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as...

I start with the premise that any social robot must have moral competence. I offer a framework for what moral competence is and sketch the prospects for it to be developed in artificial agents. After considering three proposals for requirements of “moral agency” I propose instead to examine moral competence as a broader set of capacities. I posit that human moral competence consists of five com...

The current study tested whether preschoolers' moral and social-conventional judgments change under social pressure using Asch's conformity paradigm. A sample of 132 preschoolers (Mage=3.83years, SD=0.85) rated the acceptability of moral and social-conventional events and also completed a visual judgment task (i.e., comparing line length) both independently and after having viewed two peers who...

Moral evaluations constitute a fundamental aspect of human psychology. How does moral competence develop? For decades, this question has been addressed within cognitive-developmental frameworks (e.g., Killen & Smetana, in press; Kohlberg, 1971; Piaget, 1932), and the general answer has been that moral development is a constructivist process: children develop the ability to make increasingly sop...