Bad people are not happy: Children perceive morality as essential to happiness

• In Event: 3-186 - Feeling good and being good: Conceptual and empirical links between positive emotions and morality

Integrative Statement

As one fundamental positive emotion, happiness is what most people want in life. But what is happiness? Philosophers have long debated whether happiness is about feeling good (hedonic view) or about being a morally good person (evaluative view). There is evidence that adults’ view of happiness is not purely hedonic, but has an evaluative component (e.g., Phillips, Misenheimer, & Knobe, 2011). How do we develop an evaluative view of happiness? Does it reflect growing wisdoms from learning and life experiences? Across four studies, we examined the origin of happiness concept, especially the role of moral judgment in perceived happiness.

In Study 1, we presented 4-9-year-old children (N=30) and adults (N=60) scenarios involving characters who have positive day-to-day feelings but differ in their moral characters (nice vs. mean). Participants rated how happy each character was on a four-point scale. We found that children and adults judged the mean character as less happy than the nice character (p < .001), a pattern that was present even among the youngest participants (Figure 1). In Study 2, we examined whether these findings reflect a general tendency to attribute positive traits to morally good people. We presented 4-9-year-olds (N=30) and adults (N=60) scenarios involving nice and mean characters who could move at high speeds, and asked them to indicate how fast each character could run. Participants rated the mean character as equally fast as the nice character (p>.1), suggesting moral character influences the evaluations of happiness but not physical traits. In Study 3, we investigated the relative importance of moral character and subjective states in people’s judgments of happiness. We presented 4-11-year-old children (N=30) and adults (N=60) scenarios in which one character has more overall positive feelings than the other character does, but the character who has fewer positive feelings is nicer (moral condition) or moves faster (physical condition). We found children and adults rated the slow character with more good feelings as happier, but rated the nice character with fewer good feelings as happier, suggesting moral character overrides subjective states in happiness judgment (Figure 2). Finally, we explored the potential cultural and linguistic origin of happiness judgment by presenting the scenarios in Study 1 to Chinese adults (N = 100 for each scenario), who indicated the happiness of each character using two distinct words (“Kuai Le” and “Gao Xing”). We found that despite one word (“Kuai Le”) is more evaluative in meaning than the other word (“Gao Xing”), Chinese participants judged the mean characters as less happy than the nice characters similarly using the two words.

Taken together, these findings reveal a surprisingly robust, early emerging and universal view of happiness that is primarily evaluative rather than hedonic in nature, largely independent from experiences, culture and social learning. Children and adults intuitively perceive moral character as essential to happiness across ages and cultures. The results highlight the prioritized role of moral judgment in emotion cognition, raising interesting future questions for moral psychology and affective science.

Authors

• Fan Yang, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Joshua Knobe, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Yarrow Dunham, Yale
  Non-Presenting Author