Young children’s moral judgments depend on the social relationship between agents

Mammen, Maria; Köymen, Bahar; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2020.100973

Cited by 15 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…These non-effects contrast with previous research showing that both adults and children exhibit more negative attitudes toward transgressors when those transgressors are similar to themselves in age (Rottman et al, 2020), as well as research showing that children expect a child to receive more help from their parent than from their child-aged peers (Mammen et al, 2021). In the absence of additional evidence, we can only speculate about why children's responses-unlike adults' responses-were unaffected by the transgressor's age, and we offer some speculations in the General Discussion, below.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors

et al. 2022

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Immoral actions can elicit a wide array of responses, ranging from pugnacious confrontation to passive distancing. What leads onlookers to react so differently to various violations? Across four studies (N = 2,085), we investigated how responses vary depending on whether moral transgressions are committed by adults or by children. Findings reliably demonstrated that adult participants were more likely to avoid adult transgressors, and more likely to instruct child transgressors about why their actions were wrong. These patterns arose from varying cost-benefit structures, derived in part from asymmetries in interpersonal power between adults and children, rendering adults' direct confrontation of children both less costly and more beneficial. Although adults' transgressions were judged to be relatively more wrong, participants had greater anxiety about the negative consequences of confronting adults, and they viewed adults' personalities as less malleable, thus diminishing the effectiveness of confrontation. In contrast, 4-to 9-year-old children did not differ in their willingness to avoid or instruct adult and child transgressors. Across studies, the content of transgressions (e.g., being harmful or impure) mattered little for determining the nature of responses. Overall, diverse responses to moral transgressions were uniquely tailored to the different costs and benefits associated with confronting adult and child transgressors.

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 99%

Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors

et al. 2022

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“…Once they were done with their decisions, children were probably reluctant to talk when E asked further questions. This is also in line with the literature which suggests children do not often answer open‐ended why‐questions (Mammen et al, 2021). Spontaneous meta‐talk, as compared to elicited meta‐talk, was more informative in terms of what actually guided children's reasoning and decision‐making.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Preschool children’s use of meta‐talk to make rational collaborative decisions

et al. 2022

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In collaborative decision‐making, partners compare reasons behind conflicting proposals through meta‐talk. We investigated UK‐based preschoolers’ (mixed socioeconomic status) use of meta‐talk (Data collection: 2018–2020). In Study 1, 5‐ and 7‐year‐old peer dyads (N = 128, 61 girls) heard conflicting claims about an animal from two informants. One prefaced her claim with “I know”; the other with “I think”. Dyads identified the more reliable informant through meta‐talk (“She said she knows”). In Study 2, 3‐ and 5‐year‐olds (N = 64, 34 girls) searched for a toy with an adult partner making incorrect proposals. Children refuted this through reporting what they had witnessed (It cannot be there because “I saw it move”, “she moved it”). In preschool period, children start using meta‐talk to make rational collaborative decisions.

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“…A teeny bit, a little bit, or a lot?” if participants responded “yes.” This resulted in a 4-point obligation scale for each witness for each story type (1 = No , 2 = Yes, a tiny bit , 3 = Yes, a little bit , 4 = Yes, a lot ). We decided to use the language “have to” as previous research has documented that children distinguish between what individuals have to do, prefer to do, and usually do (Kalish & Lawson, 2008; Mammen et al, 2021). In this way, this item is closest to conceptually measuring children’s sense of obligation.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some recent research finds that 3- to 5-year-olds in the U.S.—like older children in India—consider helping obligatory regardless of social–relational context (e.g., parent and acquaintance; Dahl et al 2020). Alternatively, recent work by Mammen and colleagues(2021) finds that 4- and 6-year-olds in Germany consider parents more likely to help than friends and tend to use more normative language (“have to”) to justify help on behalf of parents compared to friends. Supporting the notion that younger children take social relationships into account, research by Paulus and colleagues (2020) finds that 4- to 6-year-olds evaluate someone who helps a friend more positively than someone who helps a disliked other.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations.

Marshall¹,

Gollwitzer²,

Mermin-Bunnell³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Do children, like most adults, believe that only kin and close others are obligated to help one another? In two studies (total N = 1140), we examined whether children (~5-to ~10-yos) and adults across five different societies consider social relationship when ascribing prosocial obligations. Contrary to the view that such discriminations are a natural default in human reasoning, younger children in the United States (Studies 1 and 2) and across cultures (Study 2) generally judged everyone-parents, friends, and strangers-as obligated to help someone-inneed. Older children and adults, on the other hand, tended to exhibit more discriminant judgments. They considered parents more obligated to help than friends followed by strangers-though this effect was stronger in some cultures than others. Our findings suggest that children's initial sense of prosocial obligation in social-relational contexts starts out broad and generally becomes more selective over the course of development.

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Young children’s moral judgments depend on the social relationship between agents

Cited by 15 publications

References 38 publications

Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors

Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors

Preschool children’s use of meta‐talk to make rational collaborative decisions

How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations.

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