How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations

• In Event: Moral development across cultures: from judgment to behavior

Abstract

Adults tend to believe that only kin and close others have a special obligation to help one another (Haidt & Baron, 1996). Following prominent scholars (Singer 1981, Kohlberg 1969, Piaget 1997), these discriminations are thought to reflect a human default. Moral change over history reflects an expanding “moral circle”, one that starts small and then slowly expands. From this perspective, young children, who have limited exposure to culture, should start off with relatively small moral circles, caring only about those who are close to them. This moral circle then expands through individual development, exposure to cultural norms, and reasoning.

Yet, despite its prominence, this position has received little empirical attention from the standpoint of moral obligation (Tomasello 2020). Do children actually start off considering obligations as restricted to only close others? Or is it the opposite—do children begin with an indiscriminate morality and, through development, assume that only certain individuals are obligated? Here, we assess this in two studies—one conducted only in the United States (n = 127) and one conducted across five different societies (n = 1038).

In Study 1, we presented children (5- to 9-yos) and adults with stories featuring a child-in-need. An experimenter asked participants to judge how obligated different bystanders—a parent, friend, or stranger—are to help (e.g., “do they have to help?”). We observed a developmental shift in obligation judgments, p = .001. Although younger children (Age: 5.35) did exhibit some discrimination on the basis of social relationship, F(2, 99) = 7.12, p = .001, ηp2 = .126, their obligation judgments were considerably broader than older children’s and adults’. In fact, the Social Relationship effect was approximately three times larger for older children (1.5 SD; Age: 9.59), F(2, 99) = 33.51, p < .001, ηp2 = .404, and six times larger for adults, F(2, 23) = 46.00, p < .001, ηp2 = .800.

In Study 2, we examined whether children (5- to 10-yos) and adults in cultural contexts aside from the United States (Germany, India, Japan, Uganda) also exhibited this broad-to-narrow developmental shift. As illustrated in Figure 1 (see below), obligation judgments varied by cultural context, age, and social relationship, p = .002. Although there was some variation in the degree to which children considered parents obligated to help their children, the key differences emerged with respect to how children reasoned about friendship and stranger obligations: Younger children considered friends and strangers obligated to help regardless of culture, p = .809, p = .480, respectively. Older children and adults varied in whether they considered friends and strangers obligated to help depending on cultural context, ps < .001. Overall, older children were less inclined to think of friends and strangers as obligated to help one another, but this effect was more pronounced in some cultures (i.e., USA, Germany) than others (i.e., Uganda).

We view these results as suggesting a genuine indifference towards social relationships in young children’s reasoning about prosocial obligations.

Authors

• Julia Marshall, Boston College
  Presenting Author

• Anton Gollwitzer, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kellen Mermin-Bunnell, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Mei Shinomiya, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jan Retelsdorf, University of Hamburg
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul Bloom, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author