Project description
Exploring environmental impact on children’s morality
In today’s rapidly changing world, indigenous communities face profound challenges as their environments transform, affecting traditional ways of life. The ERC-funded CECC project tackles this critical issue by exploring how environmental shifts influence the moral development of children in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia. Specifically, the project uses longitudinal ethnography across former hunter-gatherer societies now settled in villages, juxtaposing their current lifestyles with traditional foraging practices in nature reserves. Through video analysis, ethnography, and psychological experiments, researchers aim to unravel how evolving environments shape moral values and social interactions among children and their communities. The CECC project promises to offer insights into the dynamic interplay between environment and morality, which is essential for addressing global developmental challenges.
Objective
This project investigates how children in three small-scale Indigenous societies develop moral understandings and behavior in relation to different environments and environmental transformations. Communities across the world are experiencing rapid changes to the spaces they inhabit, such as deforestation or changing land use, forcing them to radically alter their ways of life and subsistence. But we know very little about how these may impact the moral development of children.
Environments are frequently invoked as playing important roles in the formation of morality, from the immediate home environments that provide the contexts for a childs ontogenetic development, to the evolutionary environments in which the human species evolved particular moral dispositions, such as cooperation or altruism. But on either timescale, environments are mostly taken for granted as providing stable contexts for human action. To date there is no detailed study of the concrete ways in which environmental affordances and moral socialization interact, and of consequences of environmental transformations.
The aim of this project is to develop a new framework for the study of the role of environments in human moral development through longitudinal, family-based ethnography in three Indigenous former hunter-gatherer communities in Paraguay, Malaysia, and Namibia. These communities have experienced dramatic environmental changes and settled in villages or town, but they also still go on extended foraging treks in nearby nature reserves. Comparing these two environments allows us to examine differences between past and present modes of existence and understand how environmental change impacts sociality and morality. Through video-based analysis, ethnography, interviews, and psychological experiments, the international team of researchers will analyze childrens everyday interactions with caregivers and peers across environments, as well as reflexive understandings of attendant moral values.
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
80539 MUNCHEN
Germany