The basis of utilitarian moral reasoning in children and adults

Participants were Italian monolinguals and Slovenian-Italian adults living in the same area as the Slovenian-Italian bilingual children tested in Experiments 2 and 3. Results showed that adults bilingual in Slovenian and Italian were judged as significantly more likely than Italian only speakers to advocate the rightness of using physical contact to rescue potential victims, although in a direct comparison, both groups prioritized saving five over three persons. The Slovenian-Italians were also significantly more likely express a collectivist group orientation than their Italian counterparts. Nonutilitarian considerations powerfully influenced the moral judgments of children and adults in our studies †" whether monolingual Italian speakers or bilingual in Slovenian and Italian. This result provides further support for the importance of intuitions in moral psychology in children and adults. Our findings also indicate that such intuitive considerations may be overwritten by cultural or linguistic differences, even at an early age. When the numbers to be saved differ and three people can be saved by pulling a string but five can be saved by pushing a man, most children and adults, save for the Italian 4- and 5-year-olds, opted for pushing. The Slovenian-Italian results for adults were similar to those for the Slovenian-Italian children who, unlike the younger Italian children, mostly advocated intervention on the footbridge. Bearing in mind that adults' responses on individualism-collectivist measures were not correlated specifically with responses to the test questions concerning the footbridge