Children's environmental moral judgments: Variations according to type of victim and exposure to nature

Introduction Human actions are largely responsible for environmental problems such as global warming (Cook et al., 2013, Evans, 2018). It is therefore increasingly important to understand how individuals develop a sense of environmental morality. Behaving in a pro-environmental way has long been considered a moral issue (Harland et al., 1999, Kaiser et al., 2006, Matthies et al., 2012, Thøgersen, 1996, Thøgersen, 2006). Indeed, some empirical evidence shows that school-aged children reason about environmental issues in moral terms (e.g., Kahn, 1997, Kahn and Friedman, 1995), and children as young as three years of age show moral attitudes towards environmentally harmful actions (Hahn & Garrett, 2017). However, the factors and processes leading to children's moral judgments of actions that harm the environment are still quite unknown. Building upon research based on social domain theory, we expand on previous studies on children's environmental morality by examining two factors that may regulate children's moral judgments of environmentally harmful actions: 1. The target of the action and 2. Children's experiences in nature. Social domain theory proposes that children's judgments about harmful actions depend on the identity of the victim (Smetana, 2006). The targets of environmentally harmful actions are diverse. Hence we decided it would be valuable to examine whether children's environmental moral judgments would vary depending on the victim of the actions..