How do adolescents value humans, animals and plants?

There has been a wealth of research examining how children (and adults) make tradeoffs between human and non-human interests. For example, Wilks, Caviola, Kahane, and Bloom (2021) prompted children between ages 5 and 9 to choose between “two sinking ships” (with varying numbers of humans, dogs, and pigs on each ship). Children then chose which ship to save.

On the whole, this research program finds that children may maintain a more expansive sense of moral concern than adults (e.g., Neldner et al., 2018), due to their greater prioritisation of nonhuman interests. Their sense of moral concern seems to narrow with age, however, potentially as a result of exposure to cultural norms prioritising human welfare. In the present work, we plan to extend this research in two ways: (1) by probing how adolescents evaluate these cases, and (2) by including alternative nonhuman entities (i.e., trees, robots).

This sheds greater light on how people's sense of moral consideration may shift between childhood and adulthood, as well as how this may vary across different kinds of nonhuman entities. Aligning with prior research, we will also probe adolescents' beliefs about the mental lives of these targets. Anthropomorphism, or the tendency to attribute human-like qualities to nonhumans, may play a key role in moral consideration (e.g., Gray, Gray, & Wegner, 2007).

If adolescents perceive a robot, for example, as possessing emotions, consciousness, or intentions, they may extend moral concern differently than if they did not ascribe such capacities. Taken together, this work will provide deeper insight into the trajectory of these beliefs, revealing how moral commitments towards nonhumans may decline (or amplify) over development.