TP

I just read a fascinating review paper entitled:

How Do Children Value Animals? A Developmental Review - By Karri Neldner & Matti Wilks

Abstract:

"From a young age, children are deeply curious about animals. Stable patterns exist in the types of attitudes children display towards different kinds of animals: they love pets, value animals that are beautiful, and fear snakes and spiders (Borgi & Cirulli, 2015). Until recently, we’ve known little about what children think about the moral standing of animals, particularly relative to other entities, including humans. In this review, we synthesize the literature examining children’s perceptions of the moral worth of animals. We present factors about the animal, and factors about the judge (the child), shown to impact children’s evaluations of animal moral worth. Based on current evidence, we make the claim that children grant animals a high moral standing early on in childhood, but that this decreases during late childhood, throughout adolescence, and into adulthood. We provide some suggestions for the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that might drive these differences, and make recommendations for the field going forward."

I am keen to read the other papers published in PHAIR (Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations).

https://phair.psychopen.eu/index.php/phair/article/view/9907/9907.html

#HumanAnimalRelations #MoralCircle #MoralConcern #ChildDevelopment #MoralAttitudes #ValueJudgements #Animals

#AnimalRights #Vegan #Vegans #Veganism #GoVegan #VeganForTheAnimals

How Do Children Value Animals? A Developmental Review| Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations

Apr 11, 2023 at 2:19amWeb
Show threadTPApr 11, 2023

One of my favourite paragraphs in the paper:

"Finally, Hussar and Harris (2018) find that vegetarian and non-vegetarian children aged 7 to 12 make similar moral judgements about moral transgressions against animals (with children generally seeing harm to animals as equally bad or worse as transgressions performed against humans). This collection of work highlights that, as in adults, the relationship between moral concern for animals and an individual’s eating habits is dynamic and complex—possibly reflecting similar mechanisms of protective rationalization (Piazza et al., 2015)."