Children’s giving: moral reasoning and moral emotions in the development of donation behaviors

Abstract

This study investigated the role of moral reasoning and moral emotions (i.e., sympathy and guilt) in the development of young children’s donating behavior (N = 160 4- and 8-year-old children). Donating was measured through children’s allocation of resources (i.e., stickers) to needy peers and was framed as a donation to “World Vision.” Children’s sympathy was measured with both self- and primary caregiver-reports and participants reported their anticipation of guilt feelings following actions that violated prosocial moral norms, specifically the failure to help or share. Participants also provided justifications for their anticipated emotions, which were coded as representing moral or non-moral reasoning processes. Children’s moral reasoning emerged as a significant predictor of donating behavior. In addition, results demonstrated significant developmental and gender effects, with 8-year-olds donating significantly more than 4-year-olds and 4-year-old girls making higher value donations than boys of the same age. We discuss donation behaviors within the broader context of giving and highlight the moral developmental antecedents of giving behaviors in childhood.

Some Equalities Are More Equal Than Others: Quality Equality Emerges Later Than Numerical Equality

“…Finally, future research should investigate differences in quality equality across different kinds of participants and recipients (e.g., varying in relationship, need, and merit). For example, previous research has sometimes found gender differences in prosocial behavior, with many studies finding higher prosocial behavior in girls than in boys (e.g., Ongley, Nola, & Malti, )—though other studies find the opposite (e.g., Derks, Lee, & Krabbendam, ).…”

Developmental Differences in Infants’ Fairness Expectations From 6 to 15 Months of Age

“…Furthermore, such sharing behavior has been related to the ability to sympathize with anonymous others (Malti, Gummerum, Keller, Chaparro, & Buchmann, ) and to children's emotional attribution in response to moral transgressions (Gummerum, Hanoch, Keller, Parsons, & Hummel, ). Children's need‐based donating behavior is predicted by their moral reasoning capacities (Ongley, Nola, & Malti, ). The prominence of distributive fairness considerations in childhood motivates asking whether more basic roots of fairness expectations might even be detected in infancy and, if so, whether their development is linked to specific attributes indicative of infants’ early moral understanding.…”

You and me: Investigating the role of self-evaluative emotion in preschool prosociality

“…review several studies showing that children under the age of 8 years are poor at predicting negative self-evaluation when the outcome for self is 28 superficially positive (such as when one gains chocolate by stealing). The switch to 'mature' prediction of self-evaluative emotion is associated with an increase in sharing and altruism (Malti & Krettenauer, 2013;Ongley, Nola & Malti, 2014). Without the current study, one might conclude from this pattern that young children's experiences of self-evaluative emotion are nascent, and not related to the same antecedents and consequences as adult emotions.…”

“…Such results have led Kochanska and colleagues to consider guilt the 'motivational engine' of a social conscience (Kochanska & Askan, 2006, p.1589. Later in childhood, positive associations between the capacity to predict guilt in Self-evaluative emotion and preschool prosociality 8 hypothetical scenarios and the tendency to make prosocial choices have also been reported (Chapman et al, 1987;Koenig, Cicchetti, & Rogosch, 2004;Malti & Krettenauer, 2013;Ongley, Nola & Malti, 2014). However, the developmental literature linking the onset of self-evaluative emotional experiences with developmental changes in prosociality is surprisingly limited not only in size, but in scope.…”