The majority view seems to be that children have an "innate moral core," with a wide range of tasks used to defend this argument. We examine exemplars of each task for whether they really require moral understanding, including tasks tapping children's empathy, their theory of mind, the moral-conventional distinction, helpers vs. hinderers, fairness, aggression and hierarchies. We focus on both replication issues and interpretation issues, and in each case, we argue that there is no clear evidence for infants having an innate or early developing moral core. Instead, we argue that the first evidence for moral insights comes when children come to recognize themselves and to distinguish between themselves and others. This enables an understanding, not just that others are separate from self, but also that others have distinct mental states, including sadness, and therefore allows empathy toward another. We argue that this is the clearest and earliest evidence for moral behavior (beginning around 18–24 months), although we argue that development of morality is likely to be protracted thereafter.
- 9926865730601891
- A sociomoral quarrel: a critique of nativist ideas about infants' sociomoral insights
- Ted RuffmanQiuyi Kong
- Psychology
- Frontiers in developmental psychology, Vol.4, 1796738
- Frontiers Media S.A.
- 07/05/2026
- Copyright © The Author(s) 2026. This work was first published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology (Frontiers Media S.A.). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, provided that the original work is properly attributed to the creator(s) and the source, a link to the Creative Commons license is provided, and any changes made are indicated.
- English
- Journal article