The Social and Moral Development Laboratory is housed in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park. The laboratory is supervised by Professor Melanie Killen (mkillen@umd.edu), and the focus of the research is on how children, adolescents, and adults evaluate social and moral issues in everyday life.

The general topics that we investigate include developmental social cognition, moral reasoning, social exclusion, conceptions of inequalities, resource allocation, morality and theory of mind, and fostering student engagement in the classroom. These projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development (NIH), and TEDCO Maryland Innovation Initiative.

Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students collaborate on a range of projects. Collaborations include colleagues in Austria, Australia, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Nepal, The Netherlands, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.K. Please visit other links on this web page for more detailed information!