Audun Dahl

About

Audun Dahl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. His research focuses on the development of morality across the lifespan. He investigates how individuals encounter morally relevant events from infancy to old age, including helping or harming others and witnessing moral actions in various social contexts. His work explores how moral reasoning, judgment, feelings, and actions evolve through everyday social interactions, starting in early childhood. Dahl's Developmental Moral Psychology Lab employs a variety of methods such as laboratory experiments, naturalistic observations, structured interviews, and surveys to study infants, children, adolescents, and adults from different communities. His research includes examining how infants begin to help and harm others and how adults form judgments about complex issues like academic integrity and moral dilemmas. Through these approaches, Dahl aims to understand both the diversity and unity of human morality.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Political Science
• Law

Selected publications

• What We Do When We Define Morality (and Why We Need to Do It)

  Psychological Inquiry · 2023-04-03 · 35 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Psychological research on morality relies on definitions of morality. Yet the various definitions often go unstated. When unstated definitions diverge, theoretical disagreements become intractable, as theories that purport to explain “morality” actually talk about very different things. This article argues that we need to define morality and considers four common ways of doing so: The linguistic, the functionalist, the evaluating, and the normative. Each has encountered difficulties. To surmount…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals about Morality and Its Development

  Human Development · 2023-10-19 · 8 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reports of academic cheating trigger fears of moral decay. Cheating looks like a dying canary in the coal mine of morality. But this diagnosis assumes that those who cheat lack, or turn off, any genuine moral concerns with honesty and integrity. This article proposes an alternative perspective on cheating and dishonesty. We propose that cheating results from (1) misperceptions of what constitutes cheating, (2) evaluations that cheating or lying is okay under exceptional circumstances, and (3) pr…

  PublisherDOI

• Working across religions, cultures, settings, and development: Protocol for wave 2 data collection with children and parents by the developing belief network

  PLoS ONE · 2025-09-05 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  The Developing Belief Network is a global research collaborative studying religious development in diverse social-cultural settings, with a focus on the intersection of cognitive mechanisms and cultural beliefs and practices in early and middle childhood. The current manuscript describes the study protocol for the network's second wave of data collection, which aims to further explore the development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior using a multi-time point approach. This protoc…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The centrality of reasoning in moral judgments: First- and third-party evaluations of cheating

  Judgment and Decision Making · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract What role does reasoning about moral principles play in people’s judgments about what is right or wrong? According to one view, reasoning usually plays little role. People tend to do what suits their self-interests and concoct moral reasons afterward to justify their own behavior. Thus, in this view, people are far more forgiving of their own violations than of others’ violations. According to a contrasting view, principled reasoning generally guides judgments and decisions about our ow…

  PublisherDOI

• Six and a Half Lessons From Moral Psychology for Moral Education

  2024-06-20 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Moral education relies on ideas about how morality works and develops. This chapter synthesizes lessons for moral education from recent research on the psychology and development of morality. The six first lessons are: (1) To study morality, we need to define it. (2) Neither innate nor learned, morality is constructed. (3) People share many basic concerns around right and wrong but can disagree on how to apply them. (4) Moral change has three major sources: contents, mappings, and coordinations…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• The Emergence of Prosocial Behavior in Infants.

  NIH · $154k · 2017–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Talia Waltzer

  16 shared

• Joseph J. Campos

  14 shared

• Mahesh Srinivasan

  University of California, Berkeley

  11 shared

• Marianne Barbu‐Roth

  Centre Neurosciences intégratives et Cognition

  8 shared

• Elliot Turiel

  7 shared

• Ichiro Uchiyama

  Doshisha University

  7 shared

• Charles P. Baxley

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  6 shared

• David I. Anderson

  San Francisco State University

  6 shared

Labs

• Developmental Moral Psychology LabPI

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Robert Sternbergh-168
• Sander Kerstenh-106
• Savita Sastryh-95