Priming Children’s Use of Intentions in Moral Judgement with Metacognitive Training

Abstract

Typically, adults give a primary role to the agent’s intention to harm when performing a moral judgment of accidental harm. By contrast, children often focus on outcomes, underestimating the actor’s mental states when judging someone for his action, and rely on what we suppose to be intuitive and emotional processes. The present study explored the processes involved in the development of the capacity to integrate agents’ intentions into their moral judgment of accidental harm in 5 to 8-year-old children. This was done by the use of different metacognitive trainings reinforcing different abilities involved in moral judgments (mentalising abilities, executive abilities, or no reinforcement), similar to a paradigm previously used in the field of deductive logic. Children’s moral judgments were gathered before and after the training with non-verbal cartoons depicting agents whose actions differed only based on their causal role or their intention to harm. We demonstrated that a metacognitive training could induce an important shift in children’s moral abilities, showing that only children who were explicitly instructed to “not focus too much” on the consequences of accidental harm, preferentially weighted the agents’ intentions in their moral judgments. Our findings confirm that children between the ages of 5 and 8 are sensitive to the intention of agents, however, at that age, this ability is insufficient in order to give a “mature” moral judgment. Our experiment is the first that suggests the critical role of inhibitory resources in processing accidental harm.

The development of intention-based morality: The influence of intention salience and recency, negligence, and outcome on children’s and adults’ judgments.

“…Given the efficacy of similar changes in previous research (e.g., Bearison & Isaacs, 1975;Feldman et al, 1976;Nelson et al, 1980;Nummedal & Bass, 1976), this is surprising, and suggests that failure to understand or recall occurred even more frequently in the large majority of previous research because outcomes are usually more salient and recent than intentions. However, Gvozdic et al (2016) propose that much of children's outcomebased judgment occurs because of the related issue of failure to inhibit automatic responses to outcomes. This would explain the effectiveness of their metacognitive training approach relative to ours, and suggests that instructing children to "not focus too much" on consequences would have resulted in higher levels of intention-based judgment by children.…”

“…Feldman, Klosson, Parsons, Rholes and Ruble (1976) and Nummedal and Bass (1976) found that children's judgments became more intention-based when they reversed the order of presentation from the usual intention then outcome, to outcome followed by intention. More recently, Gvozdic, Moutier, Dupoux and Buon (2016) reported that metacognitive training, and in particular the use of an executive alert (to "not focus too much" on the consequences), resulted in 5-8 year-old children making adult-like, primarily intention-based judgments. This finding supports a cognitive resources account because it indicates that children's outcomebased judgment arises not from an inability to understand and use intention information, but from failure to inhibit their focus on outcomes.…”

Cognitive-Emotional and Inhibitory Deficits as a Window to Moral Decision-Making Difficulties Related to Exposure to Violence

“…To this end, our review proposes that strategies dedicated at mitigating the negative effects of violence have great chances of succeeding by targeting psychological mechanisms related to Empathy, Theory of Mind and Inhibitory control abilities. Encouragingly, recent prosocial behavior interventions have shown effective results in improving these abilities and could be used to disrupt the negative effects of violence on these mechanisms and, consequently, to ameliorate moral decisions among individuals displaying the negative behavioral effects resulted from having been exposed to violence (Chiu Ming Lam et al, 2011; Gvozdic et al, 2016; Mesurado et al, 2018).…”

Preschoolers Understand the Moral Dimension of Factual Claims

“…While Piaget was clear that children begin with outcome-based evaluations and only later consider others’ intentions in their moral evaluation, more recent research produced heterogeneous results. Whereas some researchers suggest that even school-aged children tend to give more weight to outcomes than to intentions ( Costanzo et al, 1973 ; Yuill, 1984 ; Zelazo et al, 1996 ; Helwig et al, 2001 ; Cushman et al, 2013 ; Gummerum and Chu, 2014 ), others found that when using simplified procedures (e.g., simpler vignettes) or controlling for confounding factors (e.g., the action of the well-intended and the ill-intended actors led to the same outcome), even 4- to 5-year-old (and in some work, even 3-year-old) children consider an agent’s intention ( Chandler et al, 1973 ; Nelson, 1980 ; Baird and Astington, 2004 ; Nobes et al, 2009 , 2016 ; Vaish et al, 2010 ; Killen et al, 2011 ; Gvozdic et al, 2016 ). A recent study ( Josephs et al, 2016 ) demonstrated that 4-year-old (and to some extent even 3-year-old) children take into account an agent’s intentionality (freedom of choice) and protested more when a moral transgression occurred under free conditions than if it occurred under constrained ones.…”