A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective on Moral Development

Abstract

Developmental research examines the prosocial nature of babies and young children, focusing on behaviors that suggest early precursors to a mature morality. More recently, the field of cognitive neuroscience has begun to unravel the neural mechanisms underlying early moral evaluation. Combining these two bodies of literature to study the ontogeny of moral understanding provides valuable insight into the proximate mechanisms when only some components of mature behaviors and cognitions are observable. The current chapter integrates behavioral developmental research with a growing body of work on the neurobiological underpinnings of morality to explore how early (often unconscious) prosocial tendencies combine with higher-order cognition processes to inform moral evaluations. Specifically, we explore signs of social preferences, sociomoral evaluations, sensitivity to fairness, concern for others, intention understanding, perceptions of other people in pain, and group dynamics, all of which are thought to be precursors to a more sophisticated moral understanding. Together, this work demonstrates that moral cognition depends on the engagement of several computational processes and neural circuits, ones that are increasingly interconnected over the course of development and are embodied in specific social contexts to produce adaptive social behaviors.