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

• Perceptions of Moral Reasonableness Reduce Hostility Over Disagreements

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

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

  2025-04-02

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Reports of academic cheating trigger fears of moral decay. This inference, that cheating is a dying canary in the coal mine of morality, assumes that youth who cheat lack genuine, moral concerns with honesty and integrity. This article proposes an alternative perspective on cheating and dishonesty. We propose that cheating and other forms of dishonesty result from (1) misperceptions of what constitutes cheating, (2) evaluations that cheating or lying is okay under exceptional circumstances, and (3) prioritization of non-integrity actions during conflict. Each of these three steps—perceptions, evaluations, and action-selections—show both situational and developmental variability. From this perspective, research on cheating shows moral engagement, not moral disengagement: Developmental and psychological research shows that, far from being a dying canary, cheating reveals the pervasive role of morality in decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• Beliefs About Wealth and Mobility are Related to Evaluations of Economic Inequalities

  Social Justice Research · 2025-11-10

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Okay to Cheat? People Make Exceptions for Those Who Cheat Under Pressure

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Understanding and Promoting Academic Integrity: Findings from a Campus Partnership

  Journal of Academic Ethics · 2025-12-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Young Children's and Caregivers' Evaluations About Household Helping: Balancing the Interests of Helper and Recipient

  Child Development · 2025-01-11 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Young children's helping can benefit both recipient and helper. This study examined how children and caregivers incorporate helper and recipient interests in evaluations of household helping. Data were collected throughout 2022. US children 4-6 years (N = 87; 47 girls, 40 boys; 71% European American, 23% Asian American, 14% Latinx, 3% Black, 2% Native American) and their caregivers were evaluated whether and why a child in hypothetical scenarios should help their parent. Children's judgments and reasoning incorporated both child helper and parent recipient interests, whereas caregivers' evaluations weighed child interests more heavily, ORs > 0.239. Caregiver judgments about obligation predicted children's judgments. Findings suggest that perceptions of whose interests are served shape judgments and decisions around young children's everyday prosocial behaviors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceptions of Reasonableness in Moral Disagreements: Sources and Implications

  2025-08-22

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Some moral disagreements cause conflicts—but many do not. People who disagree about abortion, immigration, or gun rights can attack each other or have respectful conversations. One possible yet understudied contributor to respectful disagreement is perceptions of moral reasonableness: the sense that the other person has sound grounds for their moral stance. This research examined the sources and implications of moral reasonableness perceptions. Across eight studies (Total N = 811), participants perceived disagreements about hypothetical (Studies 1-2, 5-8) and political (Studies 3-4, 6-7) issues as more reasonable when issues were more difficult, be that through complexity (H1a), novelty (H1b), or informational obscurity (H1c). Participants who perceived a disagreeant as more reasonable expressed more willingness to socialize and less hostility (H2). Study 5 developed a scale for assessing perceptions of moral reasonableness. Studies 6-7 showed that people’s perceived reasonableness is not merely based on the specific moral stance but on psychological attributions about why the person holds that stance (H3). Study 8 distinguishes perceptions of moral reasonableness from general reasonableness (H4) and other constructs (H5). Our findings point to perceptions of moral reasonableness a key, underexamined factor that shapes the course of moral disagreements. Even in a polarized country, people are not doomed to demonize people they disagree with.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 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 protocol is designed to investigate three key research questions-how children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents, how children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity, and how religious and supernatural beliefs are transmitted within and between generations-via a set of eight tasks for children between the ages of 5 and 13 years and a survey completed by their parents/caregivers. This study is being conducted in 41 distinct cultural-religious settings, spanning 16 countries and 12 written languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, and give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities. As one example of how this protocol has been implemented outside of the United States, we present Arabic- and English-language study materials for children being raised in one of the following religious traditions in Lebanon: the Druze faith, Maronite Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, Shia Islam, or Sunni Islam. We end with reflections on the challenges of developing and implementing large-scale, multi-site, multi-time point studies of child development; our approach to navigating these challenges; and our suggestions for how future researchers might learn from our experiences and build on the work presented here.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Working across religions, cultures, settings, and development: Protocol for Wave 2 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network

  2025-05-29

  preprintOpen access

  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 protocol is designed to investigate three key research questions—how children represent and reason about religious and supernatural agents, how children represent and reason about religion as an aspect of social identity, and how religious and supernatural beliefs are transmitted within and between generations—via a set of eight tasks for children between the ages of 5 and 13 years and a survey completed by their parents/caregivers. This study is being conducted in 41 distinct cultural-religious settings, spanning 16 countries and 12 written languages. In this manuscript, we provide detailed descriptions of all elements of this study protocol, and give a brief overview of the ways in which this protocol has been adapted for use in diverse religious communities. As one example of how this protocol has been implemented outside of the United States, we present Arabic- and English-language study materials for children being raised in one of the following religious traditions in Lebanon: the Druze faith, Maronite Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, Shia Islam, or Sunni Islam. We end with reflections on the challenges of developing and implementing large-scale, multi-site, multi-time point studies of child development; our approach to navigating these challenges; and our suggestions for how future researchers might learn from our experiences and build on the work presented here.

  PublisherDOI

• Perceptions of Reasonableness in Moral Disagreements: Sources and Implications

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  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