Recent research has revealed that some adults tend to anthropomorphize more than others and that such people reason differently about nonhuman entities. Specifically, individuals who tend to anthropomorphize show greater concern for nonhuman entities and are more likely to be concerned for the environment. The proposed study extended this line of work to children, examining developmental patterns in anthropomorphism and behavior toward nonhuman entities. In one task children were asked whether or not different kinds of nonhuman entities (dogs, trees, robots, dolls) were capable of a range of psychological states (e.g., thinking, feeling). In a separate task with vignettes children were asked to judge the morality of actions that led to a negative consequence for a nonhuman target. The main prediction was that children who attributed more psychological properties to nonhuman entities would be more likely to exhibit concern for nonhuman targets in the moral stories. Overall, the results failed to capture a general relation between psychological attributions and moral judgments, perhaps owing to methodological shortcomings but perhaps also because children in our sample did not appear to exhibit general tendencies to anthropomorphize as adults have in previous research. / text

This study seeks to show that a tradition exists of personal journalists who, more than supporting a partisan position, have moral concern and desire reconciliation. Between the First World War and the Hutchins Commission report of 1947, Walter Lippmann and other media critics theorized that journalistic objectivity is impossible, but recognized journalists' responsibility to interpret events to their publics. In the 1930s these new theories coincided with historical events to encourage journalists' personal involvement with their subjects. The work of the best personal journalists, for example, George Orwell and James Agee, resulted from moral concern. This tradition is furthered today in the journalism of Bill Moyers.

Based on Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), the present study examines the impact of temporal distance on moral concern. A manipulation on individuals’ mind-set has been made in to abstract (High level) versus concrete (Low level) mentality to inspect the ability to effect peoples’ moral concern. Our first hypothesis is that future-oriented people should show more moral concern than present-oriented individuals. Present-oriented people should, however, after an abstract manipulation show a higher moral concern, correspondent with future-oriented individual’s moral concern. 176 undergraduates from a Swedish university participated in the study. The respondents were asked to answer a questionnaire, and a scale was used to measure the individual temporal perspective (Consideration of Future Consequences scale, CFC) and then a manipulation was made. Half of the participants were allotted an abstract (high level) manipulation, and the other half were given a concrete (low level) manipulation. The manipulation was followed by a questionnaire that measured the moral concern, in the form of blame, attributed to morally questionable actions. We found a positive correlation between temporal focus and moral concern. The manipulation however showed no effect of abstraction on peoples’ moral concern. Nor did a two-way between subjects ANOVA show a significant interaction between temporal perspective and abstraction, providing no support for our second and third hypotheses. An environmental impact on the respondents is discussed as a possible reason for the results not being fully consistent with previous studies. For future research we suggest similar longitudinal studies, which would supply researchers with the opportunity to study the long-term effect on different types of moral.