Children's moral judgments of commission and omission based on their understanding of second‐order mental states¹

Abstract

Children's moral judgments about acts of commission and omission with negative outcomes were studied based on their understanding of mental states. Children ( N = 142) in the first, third, and fifth grades made judgments about four tasks composed of two levels of mental states (first-order or second-order) and two types of acts (commission or omission). The results showed that the 7-year-olds responded considering only first-order mental states, but the 9-and 11-year-olds also used second-order mental states in their judgments. Whether the acts were commission or omission did not make a difference. These results indicate that children can make moral judgments regarding acts of commission and omission based on an understanding of second-order mental states by approximately the age of 9 years.

Is There a Developmental Difference in Recognizing Harm Through Action and Inaction (Commission and Omission) Based on First-Order Mental States?

“…Taken together, whether in the case of commission or omission, moral judgments required an understanding of mental states. But, in contrast to the findings of elementary school children (Hayashi, 2007), a strong relationship may not exist between young children due to the low percentages of correct answers for moral judgment questions for all three age groups. If we regard these questions as having three choices, then the percentages of correct responses approach chance levels.…”

“…Both tasks had two similar stories, as in the methods used by Piaget (1932), Mant and Perner (1988), Hayashi (2007) etc. In both stories, a boy did something (in the case of the action task) or did nothing (in the case of the inaction task), and then something bad happened to a girl.…”

“…In the present study, based on Hayashi (2007) and considering standard adult judgments, the only correct answer was defined as the case where participants judged that the boy who knew the important fact that could have helped him foresee the bad outcome was worse. Here, the important fact means that the paper (or the hat) belonged to the girl.…”

“…Hence, their task stories were not appropriate for examinig children's understanding of commissions and omissions. Hayashi (2007) has used the similar method involving two types of acts, commissions and omissions, and two levels of mental states, first-order and second-order, with 7-to 11-year-old children. The tasks were less complex than the ones in Yuill and Perner (1987) and Mant and Perner (1988).…”

Children’s and Adults’ Understanding of Faux Pas and Insults

“…Most 7-to 9-year-olds, as well as some 6-year-olds, correctly recognized John's false belief about Mary's belief concerning the truck's location. However, with simplified stories with fewer words, characters, and scenes, subsequent studies have found that children as young as five years of age can successfully identify higher-order false beliefs (e.g., Coull, Leekam, & Bennett, 2006;Hayashi, 2007;Miller, 2013;Sullivan, Zaitchik, & Tager-Flusberg, 1994). Thus, by age five years, children may have some ability to engage in higher-order belief reasoning, but this ability continues to improve, and children do not achieve ceiling performance on the more challenging tasks until 7-or 8-years of age.…”