For over half a century, researchers have suggested that children progress through relative stages in their moral cognition (Nisan and Kohlberg, 1982), from an external control of authority figures to developing an understanding of societal needs and abstract principals of morality (Colby et al., 1983). As children progress through these moral stages, both Piaget and Kohlberg placed a great emphasis on the process in which children update their mental model of morality when they were confronted with moral dilemmas (Walker and Taylor, 1991). Recent studies in moral development with infants and toddlers have shifted from a heavy focus on the confrontation of moral dilemmas and the subsequent reasoning to using visual stimuli based on cartoon or puppet shows that depict pro-social and antisocial actions (Hamlin, 2013). This shift in techniques has allowed for a nonverbal approach to the study of morality, encompassing such groups as preverbal infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and middle childhood individuals.

With this shift in techniques for the study of moral development, researchers have uncovered precursors to more complex moral reasoning that are present potentially as early as three months of age (Hamlin et al., 2011). These methods have also begun to be used in multiple levels of analysis as they eliminate many of the issues that prevented neuroscientific, eye-tracking, psychophysiological, or cross-cultural investigations of developing morality (Cowell and Decety, 2015a; Cowell et al., 2018). Visual characterizations of inter-character harm and help allow for repeated presentations of stimuli, an aspect necessary for neuroscientific studies, and eliminate the necessity of translating and back translating complex moral dilemmas in order to investigate cultural differences.

Utilizing these new character observation based methods, differences have been observed as early as 12 months in the neural processing of helping versus harming toward others (Cowell and Decety, 2015a). These neural computations predict later moral behaviors by toddlerhood (Cowell and Decety, 2015b), and these computations themselves may be related to parental values (Cowell and Decety, 2015a; Meidenbauer et al., 2018; Kim et al., 2021). Using the Chicago Moral Sensitivity task (CMST), one indicated that 12- to 24-month-old children show the difference in the neural processing of prosocial versus antisocial actions as early as 300 ms after stimulus presentation, and the differences present were predicted by parental justice sensitivity (Cowell and Decety, 2015a). Similarly in one study on empathy, preschool children’s empathic processing for those in pain versus those not in pain between 200 and 400 ms post stimulus was predicted by parents empathic values, particularly their empathic concern (Decety et al., 2018). Finally, one recent study indicated that parental justice sensitivity predicted children’s moral neural computations in early components tied to attentional mechanisms (Kim et al., 2021). These burgeoning findings from developmental moral neuroscience suggest a complex interaction between parents’ values, children’s neural computations, children’s behaviors, and the ways in which parents transmit their values to their child. This line of research highlights the necessity of the systematic approach toward understanding the mechanisms through which parents transmit their moral values to their child, including the types of aspects of the scenarios that parents point out to their children.

Historically, little emphasis was placed on the role of parents as socialization agents in the child as scientist model, instead the primary sources of challenge were schools and peers (Walker, 1989). The child as scientist model, as introduced by such researchers as Piaget, argues that the child is active in their own development, seeking out experiences, hypothesizing about the cause and effect relations, and testing these hypotheses, a de facto miniature scientist (Piaget, 1955). However, decades of research also highlights the importance of parents and parents socialization techniques in developing children’s social lives including their developing moral sense (Brody and Shaffer, 1982), their interpersonal interactions and their long-term romantic relationship success and social life (Sroufe, 2005), and their internalization of parents’ rules and empathetic concern (Kochanska, 2002). One seminal study suggested that the types of strategies parents use to accommodate or scaffold moral development may be particularly relevant to children’s long-term moral cognition (Walker and Taylor, 1991). In this study, evidence suggested that explicitly measured parental moral reasoning level did not predict children’s moral reasoning level; however, the degree to which parents accommodated the child’s moral reasoning level in their explanations of moral dilemmas predicted long-term moral development level of the child two years later. Recent investigations have explored the process and degree to which parent–child conversations revolves around moral socialization as they are confronted in everyday life (Wainryb and Recchia, 2014). Examining parent–child conversations about real-life moral scenarios, previous research has identified several themes including moral actions or moral behaviors, judgments/evaluations of the overall actions, interpersonal dynamics within the scenario, affective components of the dilemma, and perspective taking/reasoning for the individual (Recchia et al., 2014).

Taken together, this early body of research elucidates the importance of parental discourse and parental attentional queuing strategy in child moral cognitive development. However, the predominant body of research in the field of psychology, and particularly in developmental psychology, has been focused on WEIRD samples, that is, participants who are members of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies (Henrich et al., 2010; Nielsen et al., 2017). Accumulating evidence from cultural research demonstrates that cognition is shaped by cultural contexts and shared values, beliefs, and practices (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003; Tao et al., 2013). It should be noted that several scholars have argued that there is greater within cultural variability than cross cultural variability (Killen and Wainryb, 2000). Although cultural differences are not necessary represented in individual differences within cultural groups, systematic investigations of cultural differences indicate robust differences at the group level (Na et al., 2010). Particularly, a large body of research has examined cultural differences in attention by comparing East Asian and North American cultural groups using behavioral, eye–tracking, and neurophysiological measurements (Masuda and Nisbett, 2001; Chua et al., 2005; Hedden et al., 2008; Senzaki et al., 2014). Members of North American cultures tend to selectively focus on central objects or people in a scene, whereas members of East Asian cultures holistically attend to both central objects/people and contextual backgrounds (Masuda and Nisbett, 2001; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003). These differences in attention are also involved in social cognition. North Americans tend to attribute others’ behaviors to their internal dispositions and traits compared to East Asians (Choi et al., 1999; Shimizu et al., 2017). For instance, in a study examined neurophysiological underpinnings of spontaneous social evaluation (Na and Kitayama, 2011), European American and Asian American participants were asked to first remember a pair of a facial photo and a trait-implied behavior (e.g., she helped an elderly crossing a street.). When participants were presented with the previously studied photos with the congruent trait words (e.g., kind) and incongruent trait words (e.g., mean) in the following task, only European-Americans exhibited a larger amplitude of N400 for incongruent than congruent traits, suggesting that European Americans are more likely to engage in spontaneous social evaluation than Asian Americans.

Cultural research thus indicates that culture provides an overarching framework that guides individuals’ attention, perception, and evaluation. The degree to which parenting and cultural practices differ is substantial (Bornstein, 2012). Recent studies have demonstrated that parents in the United States and Japan direct their children’s attention differently, as the United States parents direct children’s attention to central objects/characters, whereas Japanese parents direct children’s attention to contextual backgrounds as well as social interactions among characters (Senzaki and Shimizu, 2020, 2022). This type of observation allows for a more naturalistic mapping of parents’ moral discourse with their children and specifically highlights different types of attentional foci associated with parent–child interaction across cultures. In particular, one study (Kuwabara and Smith, 2022) investigated cultural differences in parental discussions of moral action with children. Parents and children in the United States and Japan witnessed one puppet helping or hurting another puppet, and parents were asked to describe the scenarios to their 3- to 4-year-old children. In these interactions, parents in the United States tended to put greater focus on the agent (i.e., helper) or perpetrator (i.e., hinderer) of the moral action with the majority of their discourse aimed at describing the actions, the reasons, or the behaviors of the agent of action. Japanese parents also focused on the helper in prosocial scenes; however, in antisocial scenes, their focus was equally spread toward both the agents and the recipients of action. Such equal allocation of attentional cues from Japanese parents to children may be one index of the cultural emphasis on moral reasoning encompassing social relationships between two characters and the consequence of moral action experienced by both characters. Conversely, United States parents may emphasize the agent of action as internal dispositions and refer to these dispositions in evaluating the scenarios.

The purpose of this study was to extend previous work from developmental and cultural approaches to moral development by investigating parent-child socialization practices in two cultural groups. We used visual cartoon stimuli that have been widely used in examining children’s moral understanding (Cowell and Decety, 2015b). While parents and children observed two characters engaging in either prosocial or antisocial actions, they were asked to discuss their observation. We coded parental speech as an index of their attention foci during socialization of moral development. Verbal descriptions (i.e., speech) have been studied as a behavioral indicator of attention in prior research. For instance, both adults’ and children’s verbal descriptions were correlated to their visual attention measured via an eye-tracker during a scene description task (Senzaki et al., 2014; Senzaki and Shimizu, 2022) as well as during parent–child interaction task (Köster and Kärtner, 2018). Based on previous research investigating parent–child conversations about interpersonal helping and harming in children and adolescents (Recchia et al., 2014), we first analyzed the content of parents’ moral speech focusing on moral action, moral evaluation, and moral emotion. Based on previous cross-cultural research (Kuwabara and Smith, 2022), we also examined the target of attention focusing on the agent (i.e., helper or hinderer) vs. the recipient (i.e., beneficiary of prosocial action or the victim of antisocial action) in parents’ speech. It is important to note that we selected stimuli that depicted clear inter-character harm and help; therefore, we predicted that parents in both cultures were expected to engage their children in moral conversations. Previous research suggests that parents across cultures spontaneously engage their children in moral talk (Wainryb and Recchia, 2014), yet the manifestation of different socialization strategies may differ reflecting unique cultural socialization goals. Therefore, benyond cultural similarities, we also expected cross-cultural differences in parental attention foci as parent-child interactions are embedded in a larger cultural context. First, we expected that parents in the United States would use more moral evaluation than Japanese parents. Second, we predicted that Japanese parents would focus more on the recipient, particularly emotional consequences of the recipient in moral scenarios.

These results demonstrate both cultural similarities and differences in caregivers attentional focus and cueing regarding moral socialization. First, in both cultures, caregivers were most likely to use moral action descriptions while cueing joint attention to the scenarios, such as “The square is helping the triangle.” or “The oval is pushing the square.” Given that moral development is typically a central part of culture (Shweder et al., 1987) it is not surprising that this pattern was similar across cultures. We predicted that caregivers would discuss moral actions as primary attentional cues because we used scenarios that depicted clear and prototypical antisocial vs. prosocial behaviors, such as interpersonal harm. Furthermore, in our previous research, we found similar preferential reaching behaviors in United States and Japanese infants (Shimizu et al., 2018) and similar attentional sensitivity measured via eye-tracking among United States and Japanese preschoolers (Shimizu et al., 2021). Together, these results suggest that teaching morality through attentional cueing is a common practice engaged by caregivers of young children in both cultures, and young children demonstrate sensitivity to others’ moral actions.

In addition to cultural similarities, we also found significant cross-cultural differences in caregiver moral descriptors beyond moral action. As predicted, the United States, caregivers were more likely to use evaluative terms (e.g., “Square was nice” or “Oval was mean.”) than Japanese caregivers. This finding replicated our previous study that examined socialization of mothers to preverbal infants in the United States and Japan (Shimizu et al., 2018). Previous cross-cultural research has demonstrated systematic and substantial differences in attentional patterns between members of East Asian and North American cultures (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Nisbett and Masuda, 2003). Recent studies have further examined socialization practices that foster children to develop culturally unique patterns of attention (Senzaki and Shimizu, 2020, 2022; Kuwabara and Smith, 2022). The present research adds to this body of work by demonstrating culturally divergent parental discourses and associated attentional foci in socio-cognitive and moral aspects of development.

The results of the present study also demonstrated that Japanese caregivers were more likely to use emotion references (e.g., “Triangle looks very sad.” “Now square is happy.”) than did United States caregivers. These results provide support for previous theories indicating cultural uniqueness in moral reasoning. While the most influential theory of moral development proposed by Kohlberg focuses on justice orientation of morality, morality of Japanese people has been characterized as moral particularism, which prioritizes interpersonal relationships and situation-specific moral values (Benedict, 1948; Naito, 1994). For example, Reischauer writes “the Japanese on the whole do think less in terms of abstract ethical principles than do Westerners and more in terms of concrete situations and human feelings” (Reischauer, 1977, p. 140). More recent cross-cultural studies interviewed parents and preschool teachers suggest that independence is emphasized as one of the most important skills for children to develop in the United States (Azuma and Kashiwagi, 1987; Wu and Davidson, 1989; Hayashi et al., 2009; Yasumoto, 2010). On the other hand, Japanese parents and preschool teachers reported that empathy (or omoiyari in Japanese) is critical for Japanese children’s character development. Omoiyari is defined as “the ability and willingness to feel what others are feeling, to vicariously experience the pleasure and pain that they are undergoing, and to help them satisfy their wishes” (Lebra, 1976). These cultural differences are reflected in the findings of the present study, as Japanese caregivers emphasized the emotion and feelings of the recipient, especially in antisocial scenarios where the recipient was hurt.

Lastly, we found that United States and Japanese caregivers attended to the characters differently. In the United States, parents used more moral speech in the antisocial scenes than prosocial scenes. This finding is similar to the ways parents talk about children’s own moral behaviors (Recchia et al., 2014). Furthermore, the United States caregivers directed their moral speech to agents in the event who was acting prosocially or antisocially compared to the recipient of the action, regardless of moral scenarios. This finding replicated a recent previous research with United States and Japanese caregivers (Kuwabara and Smith, 2022). In Japan, caregivers focus to agent and recipient changed depending on moral scenarios. In the prosocial scene, Japanese caregivers used more moral speech toward agents over recipients, whereas caregivers’ moral speech was distributed equally to agents and recipients in antisocial scenarios. This cultural difference can be attributed to the higher rate of emotion words used by Japanese caregivers.

The present findings provide evidence for the role of culture demonstrating that parent-child interaction is embedded in the larger cultural context and prioritized moral considerations prevalent in different cultural groups (Rogoff, 2003; Miller, 2005). Parental attentional cueing strategies are likely foundational support for moral development in children. In both cultures, parents used moral action speech most commonly, and this may relate to an early development of identification of interpersonal helping and harming, as indicated in a previous research demonstrating that children exhibit such a differentiation in neural activities as early as 300 ms (Decety and Cowell, 2018). Alternatively, some have argued that continuing practice both by the child and scaffolding by parents of moral evaluation would yield more complex understandings of the reasons for good and bad actions, leading to a more robust moral reasoning (Turiel, 1966). While this approach has been widely applied in developmental research, the findings of the present research and other cross-cultural studies (Shimizu et al., 2018) question the possibility of overgeneralization of culturally specific aspects of moral development. cross-cultural studies have well documented the tendency of people in Western cultures to emphasize dispositional attributions as a cause of one’s action, while East Asians tend to incorporate both internal dispositions and situational factors (Choi et al., 1999). Such cultural differences in social cognition explain how Japanese parents in the present study avoided explicit evaluation and instead focused their attention to the consequences of moral action and further discussed emotional reactions of the recipient of antisocial actions. Future research should investigate the relation between parent-child moral socialization and the long-term development of morality.

While our results shed light on the complex and nuanced role of culture in socialization of morality by identifying both cultural similarities and differences, there are several limitations of the current study. First, the current study did not examine the relation between socialization and children’s moral development. Recent studies have demonstrated that caregivers’ sensitivity to justice orientation predicts children’s neural differentiation of prosocial vs. antisocial behaviors (Cowell and Decety, 2015a; Kim et al., 2021). Future study should investigate the relation between neural development in children and caregiver-child socialization. Another limitation is that we only included clear moral scenarios that involved interpersonal harm between two characters. Children’s understanding of morality varies across cultures when moral or transgressional acts benefit or harm individuals vs. groups (Fu et al., 2016). Moreover, some evidence suggests that children and adolescents’ neural processing and prosocial behaviors were predicted by parents values about equity and equality using nuanced moral scenarios including the need of the recipients and resource importance (Meidenbauer et al., 2018). In order to further understand the role of culture and socialization in the development morality, a diverse range of scenarios should be used in future research. Finally, it is important to note that our sample consisted of highly educated parents in the United States and Japan. As previous research suggests the influence of socio-economic and other cultural factors on moral reasoning (e.g., Haidt et al., 1993; Caravita et al., 2012), future research should examine moral socialization with more diverse populations with bigger samples.

In summary, our findings provide evidence for culturally similar and specific attentional focus and parental moral socialization strategies in two cultures. In the process of teaching, narratives are essential in creating meaning (Bruner, 1990). Caregivers help children understand their social world by providing culturally shared behavioral scripts; thus, caregivers play a key role in carrying forward a cultural tradition by sharing their understandings and practices with their children (Shweder et al., 2006). The present findings shed light on the potential role of parental socialization in the development of morality across cultures.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Institutional Review Board, University of Wisconsin–Green Bay. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

SS and JC conceived and designed the experiments, analyzed the data, and wrote the manuscript. SS, JC, YS, and DC-B performed the experiments. All authors reviewed the manuscript for submission.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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