Association between moral cognition, moral emotion and prosocial behavior: Evidence from meta-analysis

Moral competence plays an important role in social, family, and peer relationships, and thus has received extensive attention. A large number of studies on children and adults have found that the cognitive and emotional components of moral competence can have a certain degree of impact on social interaction and social behaviors. Among these outcomes, prosocial behavior, or "behaviors aimed at benefiting others", is considered important in moral development. Yet, relationship between moral cognition, moral emotion and prosocial behavior still needs to be further clarified. Especially, the large body of research on prosocial behavior has provided only limited direct comparison as to how the influences from moral cognition and moral emotion are similar and different. Therefore, the current meta-analysis was conducted to compare the roles of moral cognition and moral emotion in prosocial behavior. In addition, because maturation of moral cognition and moral emotion with age might moderate their relationship with prosocial behavior, age of participant was included as a potential moderator of interest. Empirical studies with typically developing participants at or over the age 3 years were selected. Then, results were systematically pooled to show how the roles of moral cognition and moral emotion might differ. Effect sizes describing the relationship between moral competence and prosocial behavior were extracted/calculated from the data. Altogether, 39 independent effect sizes (9960 participants) for moral cognition and 29 independent effect sizes (6946 participants) for moral emotion were retained for meta-analysis. All data were analyzed in R (3.6.1) with the Metafor package. The results showed that both moral cognition (r = 0.22) and moral emotion (r = 0.27) were positively associated with prosocial behavior. There were significant differences across studies in the strength of the relationship between moral competence and prosocial behavior, but the current meta-analysis did not yield evidence of statistical difference that age could explain these differences. Further analysis revealed that moral emotion and moral cognition played the same role overall. In most age groups, the two predictors had similar effect sizes on prosocial behavior, and only in adolescents, moral emotion had a stronger association with prosocial behavior at marginal significance than moral cognition had. One explanation is that individual hormone levels and brain structures are developing rapidly in adolescence, which may make adolescents more sensitive to information conveyed by moral emotion than that by moral cognition and greatly strengthen the influences of moral emotion on their social behaviors. Further studies are desired to examine the finer differences between the roles of moral emotion and moral cognition in relation to the developmental characteristics at different stages from preschool to adulthood. Overall, the findings provided evidence that both moral cognition and moral emotion were associated with prosocial behavior, and played similar roles despite a trend toward difference at certain development stages.