Poster #127 - 18-month-old Infants Differentiate between Moral and Conventional Violations

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Norms are integral to all human societies. Following Turiel (1983), many scholars and empirical findings suggest that humans from early in ontogeny categorically differentiate between non-arbitrary moral norms (e.g., against harming others) and more arbitrary conventional norms (e.g., game rules, dress code; e.g., Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2012; Smetana, 1983; Smetana & Braeges, 1990; Turiel, 1978). The developmental origins of this distinction, however, remain a puzzle. In the present study, we used a novel paradigm using eye-tracking methodology and examining both anticipatory gaze and pupil dilation (as a measure of arousal; Hepach et al., 2012, 2016) to investigate whether 18- month-old infants differentiate between prototypical moral (harm) and conventional (harmless) violations. We hypothesized that infants would show a larger relative increase in pupil dilation in response to a moral violation than to a conventional violation. Moreover, we expected infants to differentiate between two types of conventional norm situations in their anticipatory looking based on prescribed actions.
Seventy-two 18-month-old infants (M = 18, SD = 0.42, girls = 34) participated in the study. In a between-subjects-design, children watched the same video clip in three different conditions, and we varied the actors’ speech acts. In the first two conditions, an instructor explained to an actor to destroy a picture with an upper tool A (conventional violation condition) or with a lower tool B (no violation condition), whereas in the third (moral violation) condition, the instructor forbade the actor to destroy the picture at all. The actor then announced to destroy the picture, grasped the lower tool B, and destroyed the picture, resulting either in no norm violation, a conventional violation, or a moral violation.
For both pupil dilation and anticipatory gaze, we found significant main effects of condition (both p’s<.05). Planned comparisons revealed that infants showed a larger relative increase in pupil size in the moral versus the conventional violation condition, Welch’s t-test, t(42)=-2.43,p=.018 (see Figure 1), and that they showed anticipatory looks more towards tool A versus tool B in the conventional violation condition than in the no violation condition, t(29) = 2.07,p=.047 (see Figure 2).
These findings suggest that 18-month-old infants differentiate between situations that are considered prototypical moral and conventional violations. Furthermore, higher relative increase in pupil dilation in a moral versus conventional violation suggests that the very same action (tearing apart a picture) leads to more arousal in infants, perhaps because moral violations are more severe and harmful than conventional violations.

Authors

• Anja Kassecker, LMU Munich
  Presenting Author

• Stephan A. Verschoor, LMU Munich; University of Bremen
  Non-Presenting Author

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