Neural computations in children’s third-party interventions are modulated by their parents’ moral values

Abstract

One means by which humans maintain social cooperation is through intervention in third-party transgressions, a behaviour observable from the early years of development. While it has been argued that pre-school age children’s intervention behaviour is driven by normative understandings, there is scepticism regarding this claim. There is also little consensus regarding the underlying mechanisms and motives that initially drive intervention behaviours in pre-school children. To elucidate the neural computations of moral norm violation associated with young children’s intervention into third-party transgression, forty-seven preschoolers (average age 53.92 months) participated in a study comprising of electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements, a live interaction experiment, and a parent survey about moral values. This study provides data indicating that early implicit evaluations, rather than late deliberative processes, are implicated in a child’s spontaneous intervention into third-party harm. Moreover, our findings suggest that parents’ values about justice influence their children’s early neural responses to third-party harm and their overt costly intervention behaviour.

Emotion or Evaluation: Cultural Differences in the Parental Socialization of Moral Judgement

“…Recent studies have demonstrated that caregivers' sensitivity to justice orientation predicts children's neural differentiation of prosocial vs. antisocial behaviors (Cowell and Decety, 2015a;Kim et al, 2021). Future study should investigate the relation between neural development in children and caregiver-child socialization.…”

“…Utilizing these new character observation based methods, differences have been observed as early as 12 months in the neural processing of helping versus harming toward others (Cowell and Decety, 2015a). These neural computations predict later moral behaviors by toddlerhood (Cowell and Decety, 2015b), and these computations themselves may be related to parental values (Cowell and Decety, 2015a;Meidenbauer et al, 2018;Kim et al, 2021). Using the Chicago Moral Sensitivity task (CMST), one indicated that 12-to 24-month-old children show the difference in the neural processing of prosocial versus antisocial actions as early as 300 ms after stimulus presentation, and the differences present were predicted by parental justice sensitivity (Cowell and Decety, 2015a).…”

“…Similarly in one study on empathy, preschool children's empathic processing for those in pain versus those not in pain between 200 and 400 ms post stimulus was predicted by parents empathic values, particularly their empathic concern . Finally, one recent study indicated that parental justice sensitivity predicted children's moral neural computations in early components tied to attentional mechanisms (Kim et al, 2021). These burgeoning findings from developmental moral neuroscience suggest a complex interaction between parents' values, children's neural computations, children's behaviors, and the ways in which parents transmit their values to their child.…”

Rethinking Norm Psychology

“…Pending dedicated experiments to test the implicit and explicit accounts, the implicit interpretation is consistent with electroencephalographic (EEG) data from a study in which preschool children observed an adult performing a counter-normative behaviour (ripping a page out of a library book). When looking at pictures of harming, the children who protested the adult's transgression differed from those who did not protest on an early ERP component (central P2) that indexes perceptual sensitivity and sustain attention, described as 'implicit moral evaluation' (Kim, Decety, Wu, Baek & Sankey 2021).…”

Parents’ Political Ideology Predicts How Their Children Punish

“…Political ideology is highly transmissible across generations. Adolescents’ (Meeusen & Boonen, 2022) and young adults’ (Cavalli-Sforza et al, 1982) ideologies resemble those of their parents, and values related to parents’ political ideology (e.g., authoritarianism) relate to children’s behavior in early childhood (Reifen Tagar et al, 2014; see also Cowell & Decety, 2015; Gelman et al, 2004; Kim et al, 2021; Rhodes & Gelman, 2009; Rico & Jennings, 2016; Segall et al, 2015). Thus, we tested how the development of costly punishment behaviors toward in-group and out-group members reflects the political ideology of parents—a proxy for the group-related values, beliefs, and attitudes transmitted to children.…”