Children's Judgments About Prosocial Decisions and Emotions: Gender of the Helper and Recipient Matters

Abstract

Children ages 5-13 years (N = 82) responded to prosocial and prohibitive moral dilemmas featuring characters whose desires conflicted with another person's need for help or ownership rights. The gender of the characters matched for half the trials (in-group version) and mismatched for the other half (out-group version). Both boys and girls judged that people would more likely help and not harm the gender in-group versus out-group. Only girls exhibited gender bias in emotion attributions, expecting girls to feel happier helping girls and better ignoring the needs of boys. With increasing age, children exhibited greater awareness of the emotional benefits of prosocial sacrifice and made stronger distinctions by need level when evaluating prosocial decisions, obligations, and permissibility.

Is There a Downside to Anticipating the Upside? Children's and Adults’ Reasoning About How Prior Expectations Shape Future Emotions

“…Skills in counterfactual reasoning undergo significant improvements during middle childhood (Beck & Riggs, ; O'Connor, McCormack, & Feeney, ; Payir & Guttentag, ). More generally, children's ability to attend to and integrate multiple variables in problem‐solving contexts show rapid development between 4 and 10 years of age (Halford, Andrews, Dalton, Boag, & Zielinski, ; Lagattuta, ; Marini & Case, ; Weller & Lagattuta, , ).…”

“…Between 5 and 10 years, children not only demonstrate gains in appreciating the causal impact of the mind and past experience on emotions (Lagattuta, ; Lagattuta et al., ), but they also develop increasing awareness that relations between mental states and emotions can violate prototypical valence pairings (i.e., people can feel good inhibiting desires and bad fulfilling them; Lagattuta, ; Weller & Lagattuta, , ). Nevertheless, some unevenness occurs in this developmental course: Children exhibit earlier and more sophisticated causal reasoning about negative versus positive emotions (Flavell, Green, & Flavell, ; Lagattuta & Wellman, , ; Lagattuta et al., ).…”

How do thoughts, emotions, and decisions align? A new way to examine theory of mind during middle childhood and beyond

“…For example, Lagattuta (2005) found that children 7 years and older better understand than younger children that willpower decisions (inhibiting desires to abide by rules) can be emotionally satisfying and that fulfilling desires by breaking rules can cause negative feelings (see also Arsenio, Gold, & Adams, 2006; Lagattuta, Nucci, & Bosacki, 2010; Lagattuta & Weller, 2014). There are also significant improvements between 5 and 7 years of age in recognizing that deciding to forgo personal desires to help others can have emotional benefits (Weller & Lagattuta, 2013, 2014). Relevant to how emotions affect coping decisions, Sayfan and Lagattuta (2009) demonstrated that children as young as 4 years of age understand that behavior choices, such as fight or flight, can be effective in reducing fear, with advances between 4 and 7 years in understanding more complex causal links between emotion and behavior (see also Bamford & Lagattuta, 2010; Harris, 1989).…”

Where Does It Come From, Where Does It Go? The Benefits of Examining Moral Judgments across a Wide Age Range

“…Namely, the youngest (5-6 years) and oldest age groups (11-13 years) judged people to feel more positive after ignoring others' needs than did 7-to 10-year-olds (curvilinear pattern). In Weller and Lagattuta [2014], when we manipulated whether characters matched or mismatched each oth-Lagattuta er in gender, children exhibited very explicit pro-ingroup attitudes. They judged that people would be more likely to self-sacrifice to help the gender in-versus outgroup, more likely to harm the gender out-versus ingroup, and would feel better helping the gender in-versus outgroup.…”