Episode 240: Children's moral circles with Matti Wilks

Dr Matti Wilks is a social and developmental psychologist who is a reader in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores people’s moral motivation and actions. This includes lots of work that will be of interest to listeners, including research addressing the psychology of moral concern for animals and research addressing attitudes towards cultivated meat. In this episode, we talk about her 2025 paper ‘When development constricts our moral circle’, which was co-authored with Julia Marshall, Lucius Caviola, and Karri Neldner, and published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. And thanks to Brenda de Groot, who designed the moral circle image used as part of this episode's cover.

In her answers to the regular questions, Matti mentioned The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (https://archive.org/details/ethicsofwhatweea00pete), her paper on attitudes to cultivated meat (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171904), and the work of Steve Loughnan and Brock Bastian on the meat paradox (e.g., https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721414525781).