Poster #196 - Preschoolers Understand the Moral Relevance of Factual Claims

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Social Cognition

Integrative Statement

Research on children's developing moral understanding has predominantly focused on their evaluation of, and reasoning about, others' intrinsically harmful (non-)verbal actions (e.g., hitting, lying). Speech acts, such as assertions, however, may have a moral dimension, too. For instance, if someone wrongly asserts, “This water is clean!”, such an incorrect representation of reality may have harmful consequences to others. In the present study we investigated in two experiments how preschoolers (4- to 5-year-olds) evaluate morally relevant factual claims.
In Experiment 1, children (N = 24; 51-69 months; M = 5 years, 0 months; 12 girls) witnessed a puppet making incorrect claims (“I say that is an X!”; e.g., labeling a pen incorrectly as a cat) that would lead to harm (another puppet was taken away her gems) or to no harm (a paper ball was taken away). Afterwards, children were asked to evaluate the speech act for its moral valence on a four-point Likert scale with smiley faces as anchor (“X said it wrong. Is this very bad, a little bad, good or very good?”) and to justify their evaluation. We found that children evaluated the puppet’s factual claim more negatively when they anticipated harmful (M = 3.29, SD = 0.75) versus harmless consequences (M = 2.54, SD = 1.06; Z = -2.360, p = .018, r = .481; see Figure 1). Furthermore, we found significant associations between children’s justifications and their competence in evaluating the moral valence of the puppet’s speech act, both when it would lead to harm or to no harm.
In Experiment 2, children (N = 24; 48-71 months; M = 5 years, 0 months; 12 girls) witnessed a puppet making an incorrect assertion (identically to Experiment 1) that would always produce harm (another puppet was taken away her gems), but the puppet either intended the harm to occur or not. Children were then asked to evaluate the speech act for its moral valence on a four-point Likert scale and to justify their evaluation. We found that children evaluated the puppet’s factual claim more negatively when the puppet’s intention was bad (M = 3.58, SD = 0.78) than when it was good (M = 3.42, SD = 0.78; Z = -2.00, p = .046, r = -.408; see Figure 2) over and above harmful consequences. There were significant associations between children’s justifications and their competence in evaluating the moral valence of the puppet’s speech act.
These findings suggest that preschoolers’ normative understanding is not limited to evaluating others’ intrinsically harmful transgressions, but also entails an appreciation of the morally relevant consequences of, and intentions underlying, others’ assertive speech acts.

Authors

• Emmily Fedra, LMU Munich
  Presenting Author

• Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich; University of Bremen
  Non-Presenting Author