Intuitive theories of the social world shape the development of moral cognition

This dissertation investigates how an intuitive theory of the social world shapes moral cognition across development. Children use intuitive theories---abstract, domain-specific, causal-explanatory frameworks---to guide their expectations of the events around them. In the social domain, children hold two intuitive theories: one that leads them to see social category members as fundamentally similar to one another, and one that shapes their expectations about how people will act towards members of their own and other social categories. This second theory, by which children predict and explain how people will act toward one another, has been relatively understudied. The goal of this dissertation is to examine how this theory develops, and what implications it has for the development of moral cognition.;The studies in Chapter 1 examine the nature of the intuitive theory that children use to predict how individuals will act toward others. In these studies, children (ages 3--9) evaluated intra- and inter-group harmful social interactions, either in the presence or absence of explicit rules prohibiting the harmful behaviors. Children saw intragroup harm as a serious violation regardless of the presence of explicit rules, but saw intergroup harm as bad only when there were explicit rules prohibiting the harmful behaviors in the immediate social context. These findings suggest that children see intragroup harm, but not intergroup harm, as an intrinsic, moral violation. Thus, children hold an intuitive theory by which they see social categories as marking people who hold moral obligations toward one another.;The studies in Chapter 2 examine the developmental processes that might give rise to children's intuitive theory of the social world by investigating one source of input from which children might build their theories: parent-child conversation. In these studies, parents and their 4-year-old children read and discussed a story in which they saw instances of harmful and prosocial behaviors that occurred in intergroup and intragroup contexts. When explaining why past behaviors had occurred, both parents and children used social categories to explain intergroup harm and intragroup prosociality, more than the reverse pattern of behaviors. When explaining why future behaviors should or should not have occurred, parents---but not children---referred to moral obligations primarily in the context of intragroup prosociality. These findings suggest that the belief that people hold moral obligations toward fellow social category members is present in parent-child conversation.;The studies in Chapter 3 examine the cognitive processes by which an intuitive theory of the social world shapes moral judgment. Adults and children (ages 4--6) evaluated instances of intra- and inter-group harm while they were or weren't under cognitive load. Both children and adults were slower to evaluate intergroup harm than they were to evaluate intragroup harm, and for adults, cognitive load interfered with ratings of intergroup harm, but not with ratings of intragroup harm. These finding suggest that reactions against behaviors that violate people's basic expectations about how the social world is structured---harm among members of the same social category---are mainly intuitive, whereas reactions against behaviors that do not violate those expectations---harm between members of different social categories---rely more heavily on conscious deliberation.;Overall, the results of these studies indicate that children use an intuitive theory of the social world to identify individuals who hold moral obligations toward one another, and this theory shapes moral judgments across development.