Welcome!

The Moral Development Lab is part of the Child Study Centre at the University of Toronto, and is supervised by Dr. Charles Helwig.

In our lab we study how children's moral and social reasoning develops. In particular, we examine the development of moral concepts as they are related to societal issues and social institutions, such as education and government. One of the main interests of this lab is how children of different ages think about political concepts such as democracy, abstract rights, and civil liberties.

Currently we are conducting cross-cultural research in China and Canada to explore the role that culture plays in the development of these concepts. We are also interested in investigating the development of thinking about values education in the school and the family. Other research areas include the development of beliefs about the sources of knowledge in social and non-social domains and reasoning about conflicts between parental autonomy and children's welfare in the family.