Here are some excerpts from this paper regarding the importance of studying moral development.
Yet, despite preschoolers’ general commitment to fairness, the possibility that children view people as having special moral obligations to their own group members cannot be entirely ruled out. This possibility is consistent with several theoretical accounts of morality proposed by social and cultural psychologists (Cohen, Montoya, & Insko, 2006; Dovidio, 1984; Haidt & Joseph, 2007; Haidt & Kesebir, 2010; Levine, Cassidy, Brazier, & Reicher, 2002; Levine & Thompson, 2004), and there is recent developmental data that appear consistent with this possibility (Castelli, De Amicis, & Sherman, 2007; Rhodes & Brickman, 2011). Thus, this remains an important area for future work.
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Whereas the majority of research in this area has examined how children appeal to individual mental states to make these predictions, there has recently been increasing emphasis on understanding how children make these predictions by reference to social causes that extend beyond the individual, including social categories, norms, and morality (Hirschfeld, 1996; Olson & Dweck, 2008; Wellman & Miller, 2008). This emphasis—on considering children’s naı¨ve sociology along with their naive psychology—is particularly important given that preschool-age children often weight the causal features specified by naive sociology (e.g., categories, norms) more heavily than individual mental states (e.g., traits, desires) to predict individual action (Berndt & Heller, 1986; Biernat, 1991; Diesendruck & haLevi, 2006; Kalish, 2002; Kalish & Shiverick, 2004; Lawson & Kalish, 2006; Rhodes & Gelman, 2008; Taylor, 1996).
The entire paper is here.
