The moral consequences of teleological beliefs about the human species.

Adults in prior work often endorse explanations appealing to purposes (e.g., "pencils exist so people can write with them"), even when these "teleological" explanations are scientifically unwarranted (e.g., "water exists so life can survive on Earth"). We explore teleological endorsement in a novel domain-human purpose-and its relationship to moral judgments. Across studies conducted online with a sample of U.S.-recruited adults, we ask: (a) Do participants believe the human species exists for a purpose? (b) Do these beliefs predict moral condemnation of individuals who fail to fulfill this purpose? And (c) what explains the link between teleological beliefs and moral condemnation? Study 1 found that participants frequently endorsed teleological claims about humans existence (e.g., humans exist to procreate), and these beliefs correlated with moral condemnation of purpose violations (e.g., condemning those who do not procreate). Study 2 found evidence of a bidirectional causal relationship: Stipulating a species' purpose results in moral condemnation of purpose violations, and stipulating that an action is immoral increases endorsement that the species exists for that purpose. Study 3 found evidence that when participants believe a species exists to perform some action, they infer this action is good for the species, and this in turn supports moral condemnation of individuals who choose not to perform the action. Study 4 found evidence that believing an action is good for the species partially mediates the relationship between human purpose beliefs and moral condemnation. These findings shed light on how our descriptive understanding can shape our prescriptive judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Are Humans Part of the Natural World? U.S. Children's and Adults' Concept of Nature and its Relationship to Environmental Concern.

Understanding factors that promote conservation attitudes is essential given ongoing environmental crises and the need for sustainability. Our research adopted various close- and open-ended tasks to explore: the extent to which U.S. urban adults (Study 1) and children (Study 2) have a basic conception of humans as part of nature, cognitive factors that predict more human-inclusive concepts of nature, and, finally, the relationship of their nature concepts and other individual differences to environmental moral concern and biocentric reasoning. General environmental moral concern and biocentric moral reasoning were a focus because both variables have previously been linked to sustainable attitudes. Across studies, adults and children did not tend to categorize humans as part of nature except when induced or disposed to attribute mind or life to nature. Among adults, a human-inclusive nature concept did not predict environmental moral concern or biocentrism. However, the degree of exposure to nature was positively predictive while a cluster of beliefs about humans as intrinsically unique, superior, and influential (human exceptionalism) was negatively predictive. Among children, a basic human-inclusive concept of nature was related to environmental concern but only among children who also tended to reason in ecological terms. These findings have important implications for sustainability efforts: They suggest that environmental moral concern and biocentric attitudes may be enhanced over-development by nature exposure and interventions that enduringly promote human-inclusive concepts of nature and ecological-systems understanding. Such intervention effects might be achieved by selectively inducing individuals to attribute mind and life to non-human natural phenomena and scaffolding accurate mechanistic understanding of evolution and common ancestry, which may also help to inhibit the development and deleterious effects of human exceptionalism.

Why we should care about moral foundations when preparing for the next pandemic: Insights from Canada, the UK and the US.

Health behaviors that do not effectively prevent disease can negatively impact psychological wellbeing and potentially drain motivations to engage in more effective behavior, potentially creating higher health risk. Despite this, studies linking "moral foundations" (i.e., concerns about harm, fairness, purity, authority, ingroup, and/or liberty) to health behaviors have generally been limited to a narrow range of behaviors, specifically effective ones. We therefore explored the degree to which moral foundations predicted a wider range of not only effective but ineffective (overreactive) preventative behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, participants from Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States reported their engagement in these preventative behaviors and completed a COVID-specific adaptation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire during the pandemic peak. While differences occurred across countries, authority considerations consistently predicted increased engagement in both effective preventative behaviors but also ineffective overreactions, even when controlling for political ideology. By contrast, purity and liberty considerations reduced intentions to engage in effective behaviors like vaccination but had no effect on ineffective behaviors. Study 2 revealed that the influence of moral foundations on U.S participants' behavior remained stable 5-months later, after the pandemic peak. These findings demonstrate that the impact of moral foundations on preventative behaviors is similar across a range of western democracies, and that recommendations by authorities can have unexpected consequences in terms of promoting ineffective-and potentially damaging-overreactive behaviors. The findings underscore the importance of moral concerns for the design of health interventions that selectively promote effective preventative behavior.

Inhibiting intuition: Scaffolding children's theory construction about species evolution in the face of competing explanations.

Acquiring the counterintuitive logic of how the mechanism of natural selection (NS) leads to the evolution of new species (speciation) represents a paradigm case of conceptual change. Given this, we examined children's intuitive preconceptions about speciation and their ability to construct, generalize, and retain an accurate understanding of the theory. We did so by conducting two multi-age, multi-session, and multi-measure intervention studies that assessed children's understanding of natural selection 4 times over three months using extended interviews. We also examined the role of Executive Function skills (EF) in these conceptual change processes. Distinctively, we explored whether-consistent with conceptual co-existence accounts-EF not only supports children's initial construction of a counterintuitive theory but also plays an ongoing role in the online reasoning of successful learners. Across two studies, North American children in Grades 2 (N = 34) and 3 (N = 34) were provided with coherent mechanistic explanations of NS through a two-storybook intervention sequence. The first storybook described the logic of NS to explain how a specialized body part evolved within a fictional species (adaptation). The second storybook extended the logic to explain how this same species evolved into a new, distinct species (speciation). Findings revealed that many second and third graders were able to learn and generalize the logic of speciation. This is a remarkable feat given that speciation conflicts with early developing essentialist and teleological intuitions, and defeats most adults. Our analyses also confirmed that constructing this counterintuitive theory draws heavily on children's EF capacities. They additionally reveal that once the theory is constructed, EF plays a continuing role in reasoning by inhibiting competing intuitive explanations that co-exist rather than being replaced during the process of conceptual change.

The moral, or the story? Changing children's distributive justice preferences through social communication.

Can social communication alter children's preexisting inclinations toward equality-based or merit-based forms of resource distribution? Six- to eight-year-old children's (N = 248) fairness preferences were evaluated with third-party distribution tasks before and after an intervention. Study 1 indicated that stories about beavers dividing wood had no impact on children's fairness preferences, while Study 2 indicated that brief, direct testimony was highly influential. Study 3 matched storybooks and testimony in content, with each discussing a situation resembling the distribution task, and both formats exerted a significant impact on children's fairness preferences that persisted across several weeks. There were some indications that interventions preaching the superiority of equality-based fairness were particularly effective, but there were no differences between reason-based and emotion-based interventions. Overall, storybooks and testimony can powerfully and enduringly change children's existing distributive justice preferences, as long as the moral lessons that are conveyed are easily transferable to children's real-world contexts.

The Magic of Mechanism: Explanation-Based Instruction on Counterintuitive Concepts in Early Childhood.

Common-sense intuitions can be useful guides in everyday life and problem solving. However, they can also impede formal science learning and provide the basis for robust scientific misconceptions. Addressing such misconceptions has generally been viewed as the province of secondary schooling. However, in this article, I argue that for a set of foundational but highly counterintuitive ideas (e.g., evolution by natural selection), coherent causal-explanatory instruction-instruction that emphasizes the multifaceted mechanisms underpinning natural phenomena-should be initiated much sooner, in early elementary school. This proposal is motivated by various findings from research in the cognitive, developmental, and learning sciences. For example, it has been shown that explanatory biases that render students susceptible to intuitively based scientific misconceptions emerge early in development. Furthermore, findings also reveal that once developed, such misconceptions are not revised and replaced by subsequently learned scientific theories but competitively coexist alongside them. Taken together, this research, along with studies revealing the viability of early coherent explanation-based instruction on counterintuitive theories, have significant implications for the timing, structure, and scope of early science education.

The impact of testimony on children's moralization of novel actions.

What leads children to moralize actions that cause no apparent harm? We hypothesized that adults' verbal instruction ("testimony"), as well as emotions such as disgust, would influence children's moralization of apparently harmless actions. To test this hypothesis, 7-year-old children were asked to render moral judgments of novel, seemingly victimless, body-directed or nature-directed actions after being exposed to adults' testimony or to an emotional induction. Study 1 demonstrated that children became more likely to judge actions as "wrong" upon being verbally presented with testimony about disgust or anger-but not upon being directly induced to feel disgusted. Study 2 established that principle-based testimony is an even more powerful source of moralization, and additionally found long-term retention of newly formed moral beliefs. These studies also indicated that children frequently lack introspective insight into the sources of their newly acquired moral reactions; they often invoked welfare-based concerns in their explanations regardless of experimental condition. In sum, this research demonstrates that children rapidly and enduringly moralize entirely unfamiliar, apparently innocuous actions upon exposure to a diverse array of morally relevant testimony. (PsycINFO Database Record

Is the bias for function-based explanations culturally universal? Children from China endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena.

Young children in Western cultures tend to endorse teleological (function-based) explanations broadly across many domains, even when scientifically unwarranted. For instance, in contrast to Western adults, they explicitly endorse the idea that mountains were created for climbing, just like hats were created for warmth. Is this bias a product of culture or a product of universal aspects of human cognition? In two studies, we explored whether adults and children in Mainland China, a highly secular, non-Western culture, show a bias for teleological explanations. When explaining both object properties (Experiment 1) and origins (Experiment 2), we found evidence that they do. Whereas Chinese adults restricted teleological explanations to scientifically warranted cases, Chinese children endorsed them more broadly, extending them across different kinds of natural phenomena. This bias decreased with rising grade level across first, second, and fourth grades. Overall, these data provide evidence that children's bias for teleological explanations is not solely a product of Western Abrahamic cultures. Instead, it extends to other cultures, including the East Asian secular culture of modern-day China. This suggests that the bias for function-based explanations may be driven by universal aspects of human cognition.

I've got a feeling: Urban and rural indigenous children's beliefs about early life mentality.

This cross-cultural investigation explored children's reasoning about their mental capacities during the earliest period of human physical existence--the prenatal period. For comparison, children's reasoning about the observable period of infancy was also examined. A total of 283 5- to 12-year-olds from two distinct cultures (urban Ecuador and rural indigenous Shuar) participated. Across cultures, children distinguished the fetal period from infancy, attributing fewer capacities to fetuses. However, for both the infancy and fetal periods, children from both cultures privileged the functioning of emotions and desires over epistemic states (i.e., abilities for thought and memory). Children's justifications to questions about fetal mentality revealed that although epistemic states were generally regarded as requiring physical maturation to function, emotions and desires were seen as functioning as a de facto result of prenatal existence and in response to the prospect of future birth and being part of a social group. These results show that from early in development, children across cultures possess nuanced beliefs about the presence and functioning of mental capacities. Findings converge with recent results to suggest that there is an early arising bias to view emotions and desires as the essential inviolable core of human mentality. The current findings have implications for understanding the role that emerging cognitive biases play in shaping conceptions of human mentality across different cultures. They also speak to the cognitive foundations of moral beliefs about fetal rights.

Young children's acceptance of within-species variation: Implications for essentialism and teaching evolution.

Neglecting within-species variation plays a crucial role in students' misconceptions about adaptation by natural selection. Prior research on the development of this propensity suggests that this neglect is due to a strong early-arising essentialist bias to treat species as invariant. Across two studies, we examined the strength of this bias by exploring 5- and 6-year-olds' and 7- and 8-year-olds' assumptions about variation in contexts similar to those used in a recent early educational intervention teaching adaptation. In Study 1, children heard about fictitious animals' physical and behavioral traits and their beneficial functions. They then judged whether all other species members would vary or be invariant on those traits. Across age groups, children showed a marginal essentialist tendency to reject variation. In Study 2, the same method was used, but all references to beneficial trait functions were removed. The 5- and 6-year-olds' responding did not differ from Study 1, but the 7- and 8-year-olds' acceptance of variation increased to above chance rates. Parental religious and evolution beliefs correlated with younger children's responses but not with older children's responses. Together, the findings suggest that under certain facilitative contexts children display greater abilities to represent variation than assumptions of a robust and inflexible essentialist bias would predict. By 7 to 8 years of age, children displayed autonomy from their parents' beliefs and tended to expect variation. However, priming their teleological intuitions undermined their non-essentialist expectations. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.

The divided mind of a disbeliever: Intuitive beliefs about nature as purposefully created among different groups of non-religious adults.

Do non-religious adults - despite their explicit disavowal of religious beliefs - have a tacit tendency to view nature as purposefully created by some being? This question was explored in three online studies using a speeded judgment procedure, which assessed disbelievers in two different Western cultures (United States and Finland). Despite strong performance on control trials, across all three studies non-religious individuals displayed a default bias to increasingly judge pictures of natural phenomena as "purposefully made by some being" under processing constraints. Personal beliefs in the supernatural agency of nature ("Gaia beliefs") consistently predicted this tendency. However, beliefs in nature as purposefully made by some being persisted even when such secular agency beliefs were controlled. These results suggest that the tendency to view nature as designed is rooted in evolved cognitive biases as well as cultural socialization.

The morality of martyrdom and the stigma of suicide.

While primarily identifying similarities between suicide terrorists and other suicidal individuals, Lankford also notes differences in how their actions are morally evaluated. Specifically, "conventional" suicide is stigmatized in a way that suicide terrorism is not. We identify the root of this condemnation, showing that suicide is intuitively considered impure and disgusting, and discuss implications of this purity-based stigma.

Purity matters more than harm in moral judgments of suicide: response to Gray (2014).

Many people judge suicide to be immoral. We have found evidence that these moral judgments are primarily predicted by people's belief that suicide taints the soul and by independent concerns about purity. This finding is inconsistent with accounts that define morality as fundamentally based upon harm considerations. In this commentary, we respond to a critique of our finding, and we provide further support for our original conclusions. Even when applying new exclusion criteria to our data, an examination of effect sizes demonstrates that concerns about purity robustly and meaningfully explain variance in moral judgments of suicide. While harm concerns sometimes predict moral judgments of suicide alongside purity concerns, they reliably explain a much smaller proportion of the variance than do purity concerns. Therefore, data from six studies continue to suggest that the relevance of harm concerns for moral judgments of suicide is substantially overshadowed by the contribution of purity concerns.

Young children can be taught basic natural selection using a picture-storybook intervention.

Adaptation by natural selection is a core mechanism of evolution. It is also one of the most widely misunderstood scientific processes. Misconceptions are rooted in cognitive biases found in preschoolers, yet concerns about complexity mean that adaptation by natural selection is generally not comprehensively taught until adolescence. This is long after untutored theoretical misunderstandings are likely to have become entrenched. In a novel approach, we explored 5- to 8-year-olds' capacities to learn a basic but theoretically coherent mechanistic explanation of adaptation through a custom storybook intervention. Experiment 1 showed that children understood the population-based logic of natural selection and also generalized it. Furthermore, learning endured 3 months later. Experiment 2 replicated these results and showed that children understood and applied an even more nuanced mechanistic causal explanation. The findings demonstrate that, contrary to conventional educational wisdom, basic natural selection is teachable in early childhood. Theory-driven interventions using picture storybooks with rich explanatory structure are beneficial.

The development of children's prelife reasoning: evidence from two cultures.

Two studies investigated children's reasoning about their mental and bodily states during the time prior to biological conception-"prelife." By exploring prelife beliefs in 5- to 12-year-olds (N = 283) from two distinct cultures (urban Ecuadorians, rural indigenous Shuar), the studies aimed to uncover children's untutored intuitions about the essential features of persons. Results showed that with age, children judged fewer mental and bodily states to be functional during prelife. However, children from both cultures continued to privilege the functionality of certain mental states (i.e., emotions, desires) relative to bodily states (i.e., biological, psychobiological, perceptual states). Results converge with afterlife research and suggest that there is an unlearned cognitive tendency to view emotions and desires as the eternal core of personhood.

Tainting the soul: purity concerns predict moral judgments of suicide.

Moral violations are typically defined as actions that harm others. However, suicide is considered immoral even though the perpetrator is also the victim. To determine whether concerns about purity rather than harm predict moral condemnation of suicide, we presented American adults with obituaries describing suicide or homicide victims. While harm was the only variable predicting moral judgments of homicide, perceived harm (toward others, the self, or God) did not significantly account for variance in moral judgments of suicide. Instead, regardless of political and religious views and contrary to explicit beliefs about their own moral judgments, participants were more likely to morally condemn suicide if they (i) believed suicide tainted the victims' souls, (ii) reported greater concerns about purity in an independent questionnaire, (iii) experienced more disgust in response to the obituaries, or (iv) reported greater trait disgust. Thus, suicide is deemed immoral to the extent that it is considered impure.

Professional physical scientists display tenacious teleological tendencies: purpose-based reasoning as a cognitive default.

Teleological explanations account for objects and events by reference to a functional consequence or purpose. Although they are popular in religion, they are unpopular in science: Physical scientists in particular explicitly reject them when explaining natural phenomena. However, prior research provides reasons to suspect that this explanatory form may represent a default explanatory preference. As a strong test of this hypothesis, we explored whether physical scientists endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena when their information-processing resources are limited. In Study 1, physical scientists from top-ranked American universities judged explanations as true or false, either at speed or without time restriction. Like undergraduates and age-matched community participants, scientists demonstrated increased acceptance of unwarranted teleological explanations under speed despite maintaining high accuracy on control items. Scientists' overall endorsement of inaccurate teleological explanation was lower than comparison groups, however. In Study 2, we explored this further and found that the teleological tendencies of professional scientists did not differ from those of humanities scholars. Thus, although extended education appears to produce an overall reduction in inaccurate teleological explanation, specialization as a scientist does not, in itself, additionally ameliorate scientifically inaccurate purpose-based theories about the natural world. A religion-consistent default cognitive bias toward teleological explanation tenaciously persists and may have subtle but profound consequences for scientific progress.

Learning about tool categories via eavesdropping.

Prior research has found that toddlers will form enduring artifact categories after direct exposure to an adult using a novel tool. Four studies explored whether 2- (N=48) and 3-year-olds (N=32) demonstrate this same capacity when learning by eavesdropping. After surreptitiously observing an adult use 1 of 2 artifacts to operate a bell via a monitor, 3-year-olds returned to the demonstrated kind of tool as "for" the task and avoided it for an alternative task over 2 days. Two-year-olds performed similarly after eavesdropping on someone with more discriminable artifacts via the method of a window rather than a monitor. These results demonstrate that toddlers can acquire enduring artifact categories after less than 40 s of surreptitious observation.

Aliens behaving badly: children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals.

The traditional cognitive developmental perspective on moral acquisition posits that children actively construct moral beliefs by assessing the negative impacts of antisocial behaviors. This account is not easily applied to actions that are considered immoral despite lacking consequences for others' welfare. We studied the moralization of behaviors without tangible impacts, specifically examining the independent and joint roles of feelings and norms in children's acquisition of purity-based morals. Seven-year-olds were shown pictures of anthropomorphic aliens engaged in unfamiliar activities and were asked to judge whether these actions were wrong or OK. Relative to a control condition matched for valence and informational complexity, children made elevated wrongness judgments when they were either disgusted or led to believe that the behaviors were unnatural. However, it was only in a condition that included both disgust induction and information about unnaturalness that children exhibited robust tendencies to judge the actions as wrong. This research therefore demonstrates that feelings and norms work in concert such that purity morals are most readily acquired when both factors are involved. The implications for accounts of moral development are discussed.

Preschool children's views on emotion regulation: Functional associations and implications for social-emotional adjustment.

Previous studies show that preschool children view negative emotions as susceptible to intentional control. However, the extent of this understanding and links with child social-emotional adjustment are poorly understood. To examine this, 62 3- and 4-year-olds were presented with puppet scenarios in which characters experienced anger, sadness, and fear. Forty-seven adults were presented with a parallel questionnaire. Participants rated the degree to which six emotion-regulation strategies were effective in decreasing negative emotions. Results showed that even the youngest preschoolers viewed cognitive and behavioral distraction and repairing the situation as relatively effective; compared to adults, however, preschoolers favored relatively "ineffective" strategies such as venting and rumination. Children also showed a functional view of emotion regulation; that effective strategies depend on the emotion being regulated. All participants favored repairing a negative situation to reduce anger and behavioral distraction to reduce sadness and fear. Finally, the more children indicated that venting would reduce negative emotions, the lower their maternal report of social skills. Findings are discussed in terms of functional emotion theory and implications of emotion-regulation understanding for child adjustment.