Preschool children transfer real-world moral reasoning into pretense

Abstract

Is it wrong to pretend to kick or pretend to steal? The current experiment examined whether preschoolers extend their moral principles from reality into pretense and whether this transfer depends on the proximity of the pretend world to the real world. Children are known to transfer their knowledge of object properties, causality, and problem solutions between pretend and real worlds. However, do children maintain their real-world moral reasoning in pretense? Preschoolers (N = 63) judged the acceptability of antisocial behaviors in pretend, fantastical, or non-pretend scenarios. Children found antisocial behaviors to be equally unacceptable in both pretend and non-pretend situations but found antisocial behaviors to be more acceptable in the fantastical situations. These results imply that children extend their real-world representations of morality in pretense, but more so for pretend scenarios that are similar to the real world. Implications for children’s understanding of the reality-fantasy boundary and moral reasoning are discussed.

The Effect of Fantasy Context on Moral Action and Judgment

“…Males, but not females, were more likely to choose the immoral options in a fantastical interactive story than in a realistic one. These results are in line with research by Fast and van Reet (2018) finding that children view antisocial behaviors done in fantastical pretend contexts as less immoral than the same actions done in realistic pretend scenarios. These results suggest that, at least for the males in our sample, morality may vary with distance in a manner like conventional facts (e.g., Weisberg & Goodstein, 2009), rather than being held constant across all fictional contexts, thus supporting H1 (that individuals within a fantasy context would choose more Machiavellian options than individuals within a realistic context) for male participants only.…”

“…As a whole, this pattern of results is striking for a variety of reasons. First, although prior research has examined the role that fictionality plays in moral judgment (e.g., Sabo & Giner-Sorolla, 2017) and moral disengagement (e.g., Krakowiak & Tsay, 2011), as well as the role that fantasy content plays in how different kinds of facts are imported into fictional worlds (Weisberg & Goodstein, 2009) and the role that fantasy context plays in moral judgment in pretend play (Fast & Van Reet, 2018), the current research is the first that we know of to show that the importation of morality into fictional worlds depends not only on story content, but also on the participant's degree of transportation into the narrative. Our results suggest that those who are more transported into the narrative are applying the moral standards of the real world to the fictional context to a greater degree.…”

“…While conventional transgressions can be forgiven in response to contextual features, transgressions against morality cannot (Killen & Smetana, 2015;Turiel et al, 2014). In regard to fictional scenarios, Fast and Van Reet (2018) demonstrated that the acceptability of prosocial behaviors and the unacceptable evaluation of antisocial behaviors remained constant across real and realistic pretend scenarios. Similarly, previous findings suggest that narratives denoted as "true stories" versus narratives denoted as "fictional stories" prompted equal levels of moral disengagement (Krakowiak & Tsay, 2011).…”

“…It is unclear, therefore, what differences in morality might be found between a movie, book, or video game set in a fantasy world and one set within a world that closely resembles our own. Fast and Van Reet (2018) manipulated fictional distance in a study of children's pretend play and found that, although children import their real-world morality into pretense, they were more forgiving of antisocial behavior when the pretense scenario was fantastical than when it was realistic. In contrast, Hartmann and Vorderer (2010) found that altering the target of a first-person shooter game from human to zombie-like had no effect on moral disengagement.…”

Potential Mechanisms Underlying the Impact of Imaginative Play on Socio-Emotional Development in Childhood

“…Theories of pretense representation explain how children acquire the distinction between pretense (non-reality) and reality (e.g., Harris, 2011;Leslie, 1987;Lillard, 2001;Nichols, 2004). These theories and more recent research support the hypothesis that the youngest children's reasoning about pretense is based on their knowledge about reality, as are their beliefs (Fast & Reet, 2018;Lane, Ronfard, Francioli, & Harris, 2016;Woolley & Lillard, 2015;Van de Vondervoort & Friedman, 2017).…”