Seeking Insight on How Children and Adults Understand Right and Wrong

As an undergraduate psychology major at Pennsylvania State University, Larisa Solomon had an observation that seemed to her to reflect something profound about human psychology, but that psychology research didn’t address: Around the world, people kill each other on the basis of religious difference. She wanted to know why.

So she set about exploring different components of that question, first as an undergraduate, then in graduate school at Harvard, and now as a professor at Columbia. In her spare time in grad school, Solomon taught psychology in prisons, which led her to develop a parallel interest in the legal system.

Columbia News caught up with Solomon to discuss her life’s work and her most recent paper in the journal Child Development.

What does your research look at broadly?

I’m interested in how kids and adults think about right and wrong. Some of my lab's work sits squarely within moral psychology, asking questions like How do people think about moral disagreements? or, What role does morality play in how we think about identity? My research also investigates connections between morality and two other systems—religion and law—which we look at in part because they're two of the biggest systems that people have developed to regulate moral behavior. Here, we ask questions like how children and adults respond to people whose religious beliefs differ from their own and how they perceive the morality of people who are incarcerated.

What’s an example of how you explore these questions?

I really started exploring religion and psychology as a graduate student. In one paper in grad school, I asked elementary school kids questions about their own religious beliefs. For example: Can God perform miracles or can nobody perform miracles? Then I asked them about other beliefs that were not religious in nature, like what their favorite color was. Finally, I asked them to evaluate the moral behavior of other kids. What I found was that kids tend to attribute morally good behavior to people who share their religious beliefs, but not to those who share other kinds of beliefs.

In two recent papers, I was interested in learning to what extent kids and adults think it's morally good to be curious about religion—to ask questions like, "can God perform miracles?"

Some religious traditions, especially certain Christian denominations, really emphasize the power of faith and believing in the teachings of that religion, whereas some other religions, like Judaism, really prize curiosity and arguing over questions to get to the truth. So we thought that people from some groups might see curiosity as more morally good than other people.

What we found instead is that people think curiosity is good no matter their religious background. Someone who's curious is morally better than someone who's not, across various variables—whether you ask kids or adults, and regardless of their own religious background.

We did more studies to find out why, and we found that people really value hard work and effort. People who work hard are good people, and curious people work hard. Therefore curious people are good people, is how the thinking goes, across religions.

What does your latest paper look at?

The paper looks at people’s reaction to seeing someone help another person versus seeing someone being mean to another person. We asked whether people were more curious about other people performing kind or mean behaviors, and what variables affected their curiosity.

We found age-related differences. Young kids want to know both why people are morally good and morally bad. So, children showed curiosity both about why a peer shared a snack with someone else, a good behavior, as well as why a peer knocked someone else over, a bad behavior.

As people get older, we found that they want to know more about why transgressions occur, but are less curious about the reasons for good behavior.

One possible implication (though our research hasn't yet tested this directly) is that we might be able to harness this curiosity to reduce conflict. Like I mentioned above, we know that starting at a pretty young age, kids think that people who disagree with their religious views are not particularly moral. And we also know that kids and adults think that curiosity is a moral virtue. So if we can cultivate a sense of curiosity about why others hold beliefs that differ from ours, perhaps that would move us away from thinking that people who disagree with us must be bad, and closer to understanding their perspective. This seems especially important when talking with someone whose beliefs put them in a lower-power position in society, like Muslims in a predominantly Christian country, in part because these beliefs are less likely to be understood and treated respectfully than beliefs associated with higher-power groups.

What got you interested in the legal system as a subject of study?

As a graduate student, I volunteered in a correctional facility for about five years, teaching psychology to incarcerated students. I saw it as very different from any work I was doing in my graduate program.

Every semester, we began by discussing the famous Stanford prison experiment, where the psychologist Philip Zimbardo built a mock prison in a Stanford basement and quickly found that people who were assigned to serve as guards began to abuse their power. I used that experiment as a way to talk about norms and aggression.

Every semester, students would be mad, and would ask me, "why did he build his own prison, why didn't he talk to actual incarcerated people? We are locked here and nobody wants to talk to us."

It struck me as a good question: How can we make broad claims about how people’s psychology works if we're neglecting this part of the human experience?

Have you done studies that focus on people in prison?

I’m not there yet, but I’ve started to build the scaffolding. Doing research in prisons is, as my students pointed out, generally not done, so getting to the point where I can do it is a process.

My first study on the legal system was with adults who did an online survey about the extent to which they thought people commit crimes due to some internal biology. I found that the more you thought that, the more you thought the death penalty or solitary confinement should be used.

The next study I did asked kids why they thought people go to prison. I found that kids generally believe that people go because they are a bad person, rather than considering structural factors like being a racially minoritized person in a racist society or not having enough money to afford a good lawyer.

The next study I did focused on kids of incarcerated parents, and I looked at the same question, of why they thought people went to prison, to see if their perspective would be different. I found that these kids spoke positively about their own parents, but they had the same general reaction to other people who go to prison: They go because they are morally bad.

Currently, my lab is recruiting participants for a study where we interview people who are adults now whose parents were incarcerated when they were kids to see how their views on morality relate to this.

We're building the scaffolding more and more, and the goal is to get to a place where we can conduct studies with people who are incarcerated.