Property of Mit Press: for Promotional, Proofreading and Indexing Purposes

Moral evaluations constitute a fundamental aspect of human psychology. How does moral competence develop? For decades, this question has been addressed within cognitive-developmental frameworks (e.g., Killen & Smetana, in press; Kohlberg, 1971; Piaget, 1932), and the general answer has been that moral development is a constructivist process: children develop the ability to make increasingly sophisticated moral distinctions by actively reasoning about their social experiences. This proposal features prominently in “social domain theory” (Smetana, 1989, 2006; Turiel, 1983), which argues for coexisting domains of social understanding. Moral norms (characterized as governing actions with consequences for others’ welfare) comprise one domain, and conventional norms (characterized as governing actions that affect social order) comprise another domain. A major claim of social domain theory is that young children construct different domains of social understanding at an early age by interacting with adults and peers and by attending to qualitatively distinct features of these social experiences. Does this account of moral development effectively explain the emergence of moral thought and the changes that occur throughout childhood? We argue that, although social domain theory and other cognitivedevelopmentalist frameworks have provided powerful insights into moral development, an even more productive explanation of moral development comes from an analogy offered by Haidt (2012) in which the moral mind is likened to a set of “taste buds.” These taste buds consist of receptors that respond innately to particular types of content, and there is a finite range over which these receptors can be adjusted by cultural factors. Thus, moral development may be understood by examining starting states and socially provided external input, rather than by focusing primarily on children’s