Abstract
Research on ‘moral learning’ examines the roles of domain-general processes, such as Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning, in the development of moral beliefs and values. Alert to the power of these processes, and equipped with both the analytic resources of philosophy and the empirical methods of psychology, ‘moral learners’ are ideally placed to discover the contributions of nature, nurture and culture to moral development. However, I argue that to achieve these objectives research on moral learning needs to (1) overcome nativist bias, and (2) distinguish two kinds of social learning: learning from and learning about. An agent learns from others when there is transfer of competence—what the learner learns is similar to, and causally dependent on, what the model knows. When an agent learns about the social world there is no transfer of competence—observable features of other agents are just the content of what-is-learned. Even learning from does not require explicit instruction. A novice can learn from an expert who is ‘leaking’ her morality in the form of emotionally charged behaviour or involuntary use of vocabulary. To the extent that moral development depends on learning from other agents, there is the potential for cultural selection of moral beliefs and values.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
(reproduced with permission from Murphy et al. 2017)
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In this article I try to demonstrate nativist bias by focussing on specific, prominently published and highly-cited bodies of empirical work. In each case, I argue (here or in cited articles elsewhere) that the empirical results are understood by moral psychologists to support nativist hypotheses when they can be explained as plausibly, or more plausibly, by alternative non-nativist hypotheses. This approach is subject to the charge of ‘cherry picking’ but I doubt there is a feasible alternative. Random sampling of moral psychology would be likely to yield many empirical studies that have had little or no influence on the field. In the right journal and format, I would be open to a challenge in which moral nativists identify the empirical studies that they believe provide the strongest evidence for their position, and sceptics—including me—respond with objections and, crucially, proposals for further empirical tests that would distinguish nativist from non-nativist interpretations.
References
Aslin, R. N., Saffran, J. R., & Newport, E. L. (1998). Computation of conditional probability statistics by 8-month-old infants. Psychological Science, 9, 321–324.
Baker, M. C. (2002). The atoms of language: The mind’s hidden rules of grammar. New York: Basic Books.
Behrens, T. E., Hunt, L. T., Woolrich, M. W., & Rushworth, M. F. (2008). Associative learning of social value. Nature, 456(7219), 245–249.
Bird, A. (2018). Understanding the replication crisis as a base rate fallacy. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/axy051.
Bloom, P. (2012). Moral nativism and moral psychology (pp. 71–89). The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil.
Bloom, P. (2017). Against empathy. London: Bodley Head Limited.
Brownell, C. A., Ramani, G. B., & Zerwas, S. (2006). Becoming a social partner with peers: Cooperation and social understanding in one-and two-year-olds. Child Development, 77, 803–821.
Buckwalter, W., & Turri, J. (2014). Telling, showing and knowing: A unified theory of pedagogical norms. Analysis, 74, 16–20.
Campbell, D. T. (1965). Variation and selective retention in socio-cultural evolution. In H. R. Barringer, G. I. Glanksten, & R. W. Mack (Eds.), Social change in developing areas: A reinterpretation of evolutionary theory (pp. 19–49). New York: Schenkman.
Carder, B., & Berkowitz, K. (1970). Rats’ preference for earned in comparison with free food. Science, 167, 1273–1274.
Cath, Y. (2019). Knowing what it is like and testimony. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 97, 105–120.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., & Feldman, M. W. (1981). Cultural transmission and evolution: A quantitative approach. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Chalik, L., & Rhodes, M. (2015). The communication of naïve theories of the social world in parent–child conversation. Journal of Cognition and Development, 16, 719–741.
Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon Books.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding: The Pisa lectures. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204–256.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, 163, 163–228.
Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1994). Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: Toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science. Cognition, 50, 41–77.
Crockett, M. J. (2013). Models of morality. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 363–366.
Cushman, F. (2013). Action, outcome, and value: A dual-system framework for morality. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17, 273–292.
Cushman, F., Kumar, V., & Railton, P. (2017). Moral learning: Psychological and philosophical perspectives. Cognition, 167, 1–10.
Darwin, C. (1874). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex: Reprinted from the second English edition, revised and augmented. Burt: New York.
de Waal, F. B., & Preston, S. D. (2017). Mammalian empathy: behavioural manifestations and neural basis. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18, 498–509.
Debiec, J., & Olsson, A. (2017). Social fear learning: From animal models to human function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21, 546–555.
Delamater, A. R. (1996). Effects of several extinction treatments upon the integrity of Pavlovian stimulus-outcome associations. Animal Learning & Behavior, 24, 437–449.
Dwyer, S. (2006). How good is the linguistic analogy? In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (Eds.), The innate mind: Volume 2 culture and cognition (pp. 237–255). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Englis, B. G., et al. (1982). Conditioning of counter-empathetic emotional responses. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 18, 375–391.
Fan, Y., et al. (2011). Is there a core neural network in empathy? An fMRI based quantitative meta-analysis. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35, 903–911.
Fodor, J. A. (2001). The mind doesn’t work that way: The scope and limits of computational psychology. Boston: MIT Press.
Gläscher, J., Daw, N., Dayan, P., & O’Doherty, J. P. (2010). States versus rewards: Dissociable neural prediction error signals underlying model-based and model-free reinforcement learning. Neuron, 66, 585–595.
Gonzalez-Liencres, C., et al. (2013). Towards a neuroscience of empathy: ontogeny, phylogeny, brain mechanisms, context and psychopathology. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 37, 1537–1548.
Graham, J., Haidt, J., Motyl, M., Meindl, P., Iskiwitch, C., & Mooijman, M. (under review). Moral foundations theory: On the advantages of moral pluralism over moral monism. Retrieved June 2017 from http://wwwbcf.usc.edu/~jessegra/papers/GHMMIM.MFT%20Atlas%20chapter.pdf
Graham, J., Waytz, A., Meindl, P., Iyer, R., & Young, L. (2017). Centripetal and centrifugal forces in the moral circle: Competing constraints on moral learning. Cognition, 167, 58–65.
Greene, J. D. (2015). The rise of moral cognition. Cognition, 135, 39–42.
Greene, J. D. (2017). The rat-a-gorical imperative: Moral intuition and the limits of affective learning. Cognition, 167, 66–77.
Grusec, J. E. (2014). Parent–child conversations from the perspective of socialization theory. In C. Wainryb & H. E. Recchia (Eds.), Talking about right and wrong: Parent–child conversations as contexts for moral development (pp. 334–366). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Grusec, J. E., Chaparro, M. P., Johnston, M., & Sherman, A. (2006). The development of moral behavior and conscience from a socialization perspective. In M. Killen & J. Smetana (Eds.), Handbook of Moral Development (pp. 243–265). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. New York: Pantheon.
Hamlin, J. K. (2013). Moral judgment and action in preverbal infants and toddlers: Evidence for an innate moral core. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22, 186–193.
Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2007). Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature, 450, 557.
Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K., & Bloom, P. (2012). Reply to Scarf et al.: Nuanced social evaluation: association doesn’t compute. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, E1427–E1427.
Hauser, M. (2006). Moral minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong. Manhattan: Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.
Heiphetz, L., & Young, L. L. (2017). Can only one person be right? The development of objectivism and social preferences regarding widely shared and controversial moral beliefs. Cognition, 167, 78–90.
Henrich, J. (2015). The secret of our success. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Heyes, C. M. (1998). Theory of mind in nonhuman primates. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 101–114.
Heyes, C. (2012). Simple minds: A qualified defence of associative learning. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367, 2695–2703.
Heyes, C. (2014a). False belief in infancy: A fresh look. Developmental Science, 17, 647–659.
Heyes, C. (2014b). Submentalizing: I am not really reading your mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9, 131–143.
Heyes, C. (2016). Born pupils? Natural pedagogy and cultural pedagogy. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 280–295.
Heyes, C. M. (2018a). Cognitive gadgets: The cultural evolution of thinking. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Heyes, C. M. (2018b). Empathy is not in our genes. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 95, 499–507.
Heyes, C. M., & Frith, C. (2014). The cultural evolution of mind reading. Science, 344, 1243091.
Hinten, A. E., Labuschagne, L. G., Boden, H., & Scarf, D. (2018). Preschool children and young adults’ preferences and expectations for helpers and hinderers. Infant and Child Development, 27, e2093.
Ho, M. K., MacGlashan, J., Littman, M. L., & Cushman, F. (2017). Social is special: A normative framework for teaching with and learning from evaluative feedback. Cognition, 167, 91–106.
Holvoet, C., Scola, C., Arciszewski, T., & Picard, D. (2016). Infants’ preference for prosocial behaviors: A literature review. Infant Behavior and Development, 45, 125–139.
Huang, C.-T., Heyes, C. M., & Charman, T. (2006). Preschoolers’ behavioural re-enactment of ‘failed attempts’: The roles of intention-reading, emulation and mimicry. Cognitive Development, 21, 36–45.
Hume, D. (1751). An enquiry concerning the principles of morals. London: A. Millar.
Joyce, R. (2013). The many moral nativisms. In K. Sterelny, R. Joyce, B. Calcott, & B. Fraser (Eds.), Cooperation and its evolution (pp. 549–572). Boston: MIT Press.
Kleiman-Weiner, M., Saxe, R., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2017). Learning a commonsense moral theory. Cognition, 167, 107–123.
Lamm, C., et al. (2011). Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain. NeuroImage, 54, 2492–2502.
Le Grand, R., Mondloch, C. J., Maurer, D., & Brent, H. P. (2004). Impairment in holistic face processing following early visual deprivation. Psychological Science, 15, 762–768.
Lewens, T. (2015). Cultural evolution: Conceptual challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mackintosh, N. J. (1974). The psychology of animal learning. Cambridge: Academic Press.
Meltzoff, A. N. (1995). Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children. Developmental Psychology, 31, 838.
Michel, C., Rossion, B., Han, J., Chung, C. S., & Caldara, R. (2006). Holistic processing is finely tuned for faces of one’s own race. Psychological Science, 17, 608–615.
Mill, J. S. (1861). Utilitarianism. Fraser’s Magazine, November, pp. 525–534.
Moore, R. (2016). Gricean communication and cognitive development. The Philosophical Quarterly, 67, 303–326.
Moore, R. (2017). Social cognition, Stag Hunts, and the evolution of language. Biology and Philosophy, 32, 797–818.
Murphy, J., Gray, K. L., & Cook, R. (2017). The composite face illusion. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 245–261.
Nichols, S. (2005). Innateness and moral psychology. In P. Carruthers & S. Laurence (Eds.), The innate mind: Structure and content. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pearce, J. M. (2008). Animal learning and cognition: An introduction (3rd ed.). New York: Psychology Press.
Pinker, S. (2003). The language instinct: How the mind creates language. London: Penguin.
Preston, S. D., & De Waal, F. B. (2002). Empathy: its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 1–20.
Prinz, J. J. (2014). Where do morals come from?—A plea for a cultural approach. In M. Christen, C. van Schaik, J. Fischer, M. Huppenbauer, & C. Tanner (Eds.), Empirically informed ethics: Morality between facts and norms (pp. 99–116). Cham: Springer.
Priva, U. C., & Austerweil, J. L. (2015). Analyzing the history of cognition using topic models. Cognition, 135, 4–9.
Railton, P. (2017). Moral learning: Conceptual foundations and normative relevance. Cognition, 167, 172–190.
Rhodes, M., & Wellman, H. (2013). Constructing a new theory from old ideas and new evidence. Cognitive Science, 37, 592–604.
Rhodes, M., & Wellman, H. (2017). Moral learning as intuitive theory revision. Cognition, 167, 191–200.
Richerson, P., Baldini, R., Bell, A. V., Demps, K., Frost, K., Hillis, V., et al. (2016). Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39, 1–68.
Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R. (2005). Not by genes alone. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rozin, P. (1988). Cultural approaches to human food preferences. In J. E. Morley, M. B. Sterman, & J. H. Walsh (Eds.), Nutritional modulation of neural function (pp. 137–153). San Diego: Academic Press.
Ruffman, T., et al. (2017). Do infants really experience emotional contagion? Child Development Perspectives, 11, 270–274.
Sabbagh, M. A., & Paulus, M. (2018). Replication studies of implicit false belief with infants and toddlers. Cognitive Development, 46, 1–3.
Scarf, D., Imuta, K., Colombo, M., & Hayne, H. (2012). Social evaluation or simple association? Simple associations may explain moral reasoning in infants. PLoS ONE, 7, e42698.
Shea, N. (2012). Inherited representations are read in development. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 64, 1–31.
Shettleworth, S. J. (1972). Constraints on learning. In D. S. Lehrman, R. A. Hinde, & E. Shaw (Eds.), Advances in the study of behavior (Vol. 4, pp. 1–68). Cambridge: Academic Press.
Simner, M. L. (1971). Newborn’s response to the cry of another infant. Developmental Psychology, 5, 136–150.
Singer, P. (2015). The most good you can do: How effective altruism is changing ideas about living ethically. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sterelny, K. (2009). Peacekeeping in the culture wars. In K. Laland & B. Galef (Eds.), The question of animal culture (pp. 288–304). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sterelny, K. (2010). Moral nativism: A sceptical response. Mind and Language, 25, 279–297.
Susilo, T., Crookes, K., McKone, E., & Turner, H. (2009). The composite task reveals stronger holistic processing in children than adults for child faces. PLoS ONE, 4, e6460.
Tolman, E. C. (1932). Purposive behavior in animals and men (p. 463). New York: Century Co.
Tomasello, M., Kruger, A. C., & Ratner, H. H. (1993). Cultural learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 495–511.
Turiel, E. (2002). The culture of morality: Social development, context, and conflict. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vinik, J., Johnston, M., Grusec, J. E., & Farrell, R. (2013). Understanding the learning of values using a domains-of-socialization framework. Journal of Moral Education, 42, 475–493.
Walker, C. M., & Lombrozo, T. (2017). Explaining the moral of the story. Cognition, 167, 266–281.
Warneken, F., Lohse, K., Melis, A. P., & Tomasello, M. (2011). Young children share the spoils after collaboration. Psychological Science, 22, 267–273.
Warneken, F., & Tomasello, M. (2006). Altruistic helping in human infants and young chimpanzees. Science, 311, 1301–1303.
Wright, J. C., & Bartsch, K. (2008). Portraits of early moral sensibility in two children’s everyday conversations. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly (1982-), 54, 56–85.
Youngblood, M., & Lahti, D. (2018). A bibliometric analysis of the interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution. Palgrave Communications, 4, 120.
Zagzebski, L. (2013). Moral exemplars in theory and practice. School Field, 11, 193–206.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kim Sterelny, Caterina Dulles and two anonymous referees at Synthese, to Rich Cook for advice on configural face processing, John Pearce for guidance on partial reinforcement, and, especially, to Peter Railton for enriching conversation and detailed comments—many of them dissenting—on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Heyes, C. Is morality a gadget? Nature, nurture and culture in moral development. Synthese 198, 4391–4414 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02348-w
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02348-w