Learning Moral Norms: “Cultural Models” in Children’s Eyes

This chapter focuses on child development, an understudied direction in cultural models, theories, and research. Placing children’s active learning at the center of analysis, the chapter addresses this key question: What can we learn about the making and un-making of “cultural models” when we see the social world through the eyes of young children, rather than those of adults? The chapter examines the particular domain of learning moral norms in early childhood, that is, how children negotiate cultural models in the process of developing moral knowledge and emotions. It presents research findings from my own projects, one on urban middle-class children in 2010s Shanghai, China, and the other on rural children in 1950s–60s Taiwan. Instead of taking for granted the moral knowledge and beliefs explicitly promoted by adult educators and caregivers, my research calls for paying close attention to what children actually learned and how. I anchor such inquiry in ethnographic fieldwork that integrates multiple research methods, including observations, interviews, surveys, experiments, and computational text-analytics. This chapter takes inspiration from Chinese thought on morality and human development and facilitates interdisciplinary conversations between cognitive anthropology and developmental psychology.