The development of a morality against power abuse: The case of bribery.

Abstract

In three experiments, we presented children and adults with opportunities to condemn acts resembling bribery, a prevalent form of power abuse. Adults and children (N = 333) in the United States rated the acceptability of actions by contest judges. Judges used their position in a self-serving (e.g., accepted or requested gifts from contestants prior to picking winners) versus responsible (e.g., rejected gifts, accepted gifts after judging) way. Across experiments, children by age 10 gave harsher ratings to judges who accepted or requested gifts prior to selecting the contest winners. Further, children expected judges to become biased (Experiment 1) and secretive (Experiment 2) if they accepted gifts during the contest. Children’s judgments were influenced by characters’ authority level (Experiment 3) and varied as a function of age and modality of assessment (e.g., whether gifts were accepted vs. rejected). Taken together, these results constitute evidence that by late childhood people showcase an emerging moral stance against unethical actions linked to authority-based corruption.

Greasing (small) palms: Early rejection of bribery

“…As indicated by their own justifications, this shift was supported by an increase in other‐regarding concerns. These findings match previous work on children's third‐party judgments of bribes (Reyes‐Jaquez & Koenig, 2021), inequality aversion (e.g., Fehr et al, 2008), and impartiality (e.g., Mills & Keil, 2008). Interestingly, when children favored taking gifts, 43% of the time they chose as the winner the inferior drawing, indicating openness to cooperate with benefactors.…”

“…Furthermore, participants in Experiment 1A, who saw the same note, usually expected that the contestant aimed to benefit from the gift (see children's explanations). Finally, children consider it worse for a judge to accept a gift before versus after picking a contest winner (Reyes‐Jaquez & Koenig, 2021). To the extent that children identify self‐interest in gifts given before picking a winner, it is likely that they are interpreting them as something more than a simple exchange.…”

“…Furthermore, like some other cases of corruption, bribery is multifaceted, as it often interweaves ethical, economic, and relational considerations and tradeoffs (e.g., Dungan et al, 2017; Liu et al, 2017). There is initial evidence that, when evaluating other individuals' actions, even children can publicly reject bribe‐taking: When presented with stories describing contest judges who accepted or rejected gifts given as bribes, children by age 10 publicly condemned those who accepted gifts (Reyes‐Jaquez & Koenig, 2021). Critically, as mentioned above, bribery usually is done in secret.…”

Political Ideology in Early Childhood: Making the Case for Studying Young Children in Political Psychology

“…Research with young children has also begun to make contributions to traditional topics of inquiry in political psychology such as national identity and nationalism (e.g., Brown, 2011; Hussak & Cimpian, 2019; Santhanagopalan et al, 2021; Siddiqui et al, 2020), intergroup emotions (e.g., Ran et al, 2022), and dehumanization (for review, see McLoughlin & Over, 2018). In addition, studying young children has already proved informative for the study of attitudes toward politically charged social issues such as affirmative action (e.g., Sierksma & Shutts, 2020) and corruption and crime (e.g., Dunlea & Heiphetz, 2021; McAuliffe & Dunham, 2021; Reyes‐Jaquez & Koenig, 2021).…”

Evidence for a developmental shift in the motivation underlying helping in early childhood

“…In middle childhood, these strategic motivations further include “competitive altruism” as documented by the fact that 8‐year‐olds selectively increase their prosociality to “outshine” their peers (Herrmann et al., 2019 ). Moreover, by age 10, children understand others’ strategic motivations and evaluate those who abuse a position of power to further their own interests negatively (Reyes‐Jaquez & Koenig, 2021 ; see also Heyman et al., 2014 ).…”