Transferring Moral Information Across the Fiction-Reality Boundary in Early Childhood

• In Event: Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Topic - Moral Development

Abstract

Moral reasoning and behavior in early childhood have been extensively studied (Smetana 1983; Turiel, 1983), with particular emphasis on how children consider moral norms (Smetana et al., 2012). Simultaneously to moral development, throughout the preschool years, children are developing their understanding of the difference between pretense and reality, especially for social reasoning (Fast & Van Reet, 2018; Lillard & Woolley, 2015). Yet, the ways in which children reason about morally charged actions, behaviors, and ultimately persons, across the fiction-reality boundary has been underexplored. By studying the moral domain in pretense, where children can abstract social information and simulate social experiences (Mar & Oatley, 2008), we can learn about children’s development through both pretend play and their understanding of their social partners. In the current exploratory study, we present children with morally valenced actions in pretense only and investigate whether they reason about these fictional actions as having consequences in the real world.

Thirty-five three-year-olds (16 girls, 36 to 47 months, M = 43.3, SD = 2.78), 35 four-year-olds (20 girls, 48 to 60 months, M = 54.7, SD = 3.37), and 32 five-year-olds (15 girls, 60 to 72 months, M = 53.9, SD = 9.42) were randomly assigned into one of two conditions, in which their action either helped or hurt the protagonist in a story they were read aloud. Children then completed a variant of the dictator game, in which they decided how to distribute eight stickers between themselves and another absent, anonymous child. A multiple linear regression analysis revealed no significant main effect of type of protagonist (hero vs. villain) (p = .21), type of action (hurt vs. help) (p = .08), or age (in months) (p =.76). There was no significant interaction between protagonist type and age (p = .24), or action type and age (p = .06). However, there was a significant interaction between the type of protagonist and the type of action undertaken, B = 11.35, p = 0.006. In addition, there was a significant three-way interaction between type of protagonist, type of action, and age, B = -.21, p = 0.004.

These findings indicated that children who helped the hero tended to distribute stickers fairly consistently across ages. However, with increasing age, children tended to give away more stickers if they have hurt the hero—potentially as a compensation mechanism (Vaish et al., 2016; 2018). Further, as children grow older, they seemed to give away more stickers when they help the villain and fewer when they hurt the villain—possibly to make up for causing a negative outcome. In essence, it appears as though older children deem actively hurting the villain as good, and actively helping the villain as bad, but this pattern does not exist in younger children, pointing to a developmental shift in moral reasoning competence (Van de Vondervoort & Hamlin, 2017). Thus, with increasing age, children transfer morally valenced information from pretense into reality, which drives changes in their real-world altruistic behavior.

Authors

• Vjosa Poshka, George Mason University
  Presenting Author

• My Viet Ha Nguyen, University of Houston
  Non-Presenting Author

• Thalia Raquel Goldstein, George Mason University
  Non-Presenting Author