Poster #129 - Puppets vs Humans: Do the Agents Matter in Children’s Moral Behaviors?

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

In this study, we asked whether there were meaningful differences between methodological choices for depicting moral scenarios, in particular between enactments by puppets and human agents. A prevailing, unchallenged assumption in moral developmental research is that children’s responses to puppet enactments are sufficiently generalizable to real-world contexts. Yet puppet and human enactments vary in the extent of power distance between child and transgressor, which could lead to perceived differences in retaliatory threat and subsequent effects on children’s tendencies to punish the transgressor’s wrongdoing. We considered that children’s punishment of third-party injustice could be reduced when the moral scenario was enacted by human adults, where the potential cost of retaliation from an authority figure was high, as compared to when the moral scenario was enacted by puppets, where the puppets did not hold social power over the child.

Our sample consisted 80 five- to six-year-olds. 40 children participated in the Puppet condition and 40 children participated in the Human condition. Animal puppets enacted the moral scenario in the Puppet condition, while adult females enacted the moral scenario in the Human condition. Children were impartial third-party witnesses, such that they were neither personally involved, nor stood to benefit from their responses to the moral scenario. The transgressor disobeyed instructions (authority violation), destroyed someone’s property (care violation), and falsely accused the non-transgressor of her misbehaviors (honesty violation); the non-transgressor did not violate any moral norm. Children were assessed on verbal protest and tattle, as well as resource distribution, which involved distributing resources between the agents on four independent trials.

Across both conditions, children were equally likely to protest the transgressor’s misbehaviors (25% and 20% of children, in Puppet and Human conditions respectively), chi-square(1, N = 80) = .29, p = .59, and to tattle on the transgressor (78% and 68% of children respectively), chi-square(1, N = 80) = 1.00, p = .32 (Figure 1). Children also distributed less favorable compositions of desirable resources to the transgressor than to the non-transgressor on a significant proportion of trials than expected at chance, both when the agents were puppets, t(39) = 3.98, p < .001, d = .63, and when the agents were humans, t(39) = 6.49, p < .001, d = 1.03; there were no differences in the tendency to do so across conditions, F(1, 78) = 1.68, p = .20, partial eta-squared = .02 (Figure 2).

Overall, children punished third-party injustice when there was no obvious benefit to themselves and a costly risk of retaliation from the transgressor, suggesting altruistic motivations in punishing third-party misconduct. More importantly, we found no differences between using puppet and human enactments to depict the moral scenario. These results indicate the possibility of generalizing children’s moral behaviors from puppet studies to their interactions with real people. Given that children showed no heightened sensitivities toward the potential social costs of imposing third-party punishment on human adults, these results also point to a robust sense of justice emerging from the preschool years.

Authors

• Kristy Jia Jin Lee, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author