Varieties of value: Children differentiate caring from liking

Abstract

Liking one object more than another does not guarantee caring about it more, and vice-versa.Here we show that with age, children increasingly distinguish between these two ways of valuing objects. We conducted three experiments on 589 children and 415 adults. In Experiment 1, 3-7year-olds and adults chose between their own plain sticker and another more attractive one. Among 6-7-year-olds and adults, choices of the plain sticker were relatively more common for caring than liking. In Experiment 2, 3-6-year-olds and adults inferred what others care about and like. Among 4-6-year-olds and adults, choices of a plain object owned by another person were relatively more common in inferences about caring than liking. However, children chose the owned objects at low rates, raising the possibility that children had predominantly based judgments on the relative attractiveness of the objects. Experiment 3 addressed this concern by examining judgments about identical-looking objects.

I may not like you, but I still care: Children differentiate moral concern from other constructs.

“…The concept of “liking” might hold less obligation than moral concern and so be less “costly,” allowing more entities to be consistently included within its boundaries. Our findings support research showing that children conceive of caring and liking as distinct concepts of regard for objects (Pesowski et al, 2021) and reveal that children differentiate these concepts across a range of societal entities as well. Further, they verify the circles paradigm as a reliable measure for tracking and distinguishing children’s social judgments based on these concepts in development.…”

“…They may also be more likely to grant moral status to well-known entities simply because they are familiar (just as they are more likely to trust and like them; Plötner et al, 2015). While research suggests that children differentiate between caring about and liking objects from 4 years of age (Pesowski et al, 2021), we are not aware of any work that has systematically examined if (and how) children differentiate these constructs when thinking about entities that may be worthy of moral concern-like other people and animals they might encounter in their everyday lives.…”

“…Using the same 24 societal entities examined in Neldner et al (2018), we asked children how much they cared about, liked, or knew about each entity. We expected distinct developmental patterns in children’s prioritization of entities when making caring judgments, in contrast to making liking and knowing judgments, as young children have been shown to differentiate these concepts (Pesowski & Friedman, 2019; Pesowski et al, 2021).…”

When does ownership matter? Parents’ reasoning about children's conflicts over possessions

“…Prior work has established that adults and children care about special objects. They recognize that some possessions are linked more strongly to the self (Diesendruck & Perez, 2015), and that people care more about them than other kinds of objects (likely because of their special histories; Gelman & Davidson, 2016;Pesowski et al, 2021). Study 2 was the first to examine if adults more strongly uphold owners' rights when a special object is involved than otherwise.…”

“…Prior work shows that many children have special objects (e.g., Gelman & Davidson, 2016) and that both children and adults know that others "care a lot" about these special possessions (Pesowski et al, 2021). These possessions are intimately tied to the self (Diesendruck & Perez, 2015), and thus violations of owners' rights over special objects should be viewed more severely (see related work on "strength of ownership"; Davoodi et al, 2020).…”