harm brought about by physical contact is judged to be worse than harm caused by impersonal,
no-contact actions. In Experiment 1, Italian monolingual children aged 4 to 6 were asked to
indicate whether they would prioritize saving fi ve persons through contact over saving three
persons without contact with both courses of action involving harm to a single victim. A
preference for saving more persons did not emerge until the age of 6 years. By contrast, in
Experiment 2, children with a Slovenian-Italian linguistic and cultural background judged that
to save fi ve with contact was preferable even at the age of 4 and 5 years. In Experiment 3,
Slovenian-Italian adults were also signifi cantly more likely than Italian-only speakers to advocate
using contact, although in a direct comparison, both groups prioritized saving fi ve over three
persons regardless of the means. Moral diversity is discussed in terms of cultural and linguistic
constraints that may serve to mediate the use of considerations of contact in an intuitive moral
psychology.
