Conceptual Continuity in the Development of Intent-Based Moral Judgment

• In Event: Mental State Understanding and Moral Development

Abstract

Research has repeatedly reported that when asked to generate a moral judgment, younger preschoolers tend to judge based on the outcomes of agents’ actions or equally on actions’ outcomes and agents’ intentions, whereas older children (aged 5 and upwards) tend to rely mostly on intentions (Piaget, 1932; Killen et al., 2011). I will first present evidence from a sample of 404 children aged 4–8 years that this outcome-to-intent shift occurs for the evaluation of help and harm. Next, I will ask how this development of intent-based judgment can be explained. Two main views have been proposed, one that emphasizes conceptual change and the other that emphasizes conceptual continuities. According to the former, the shift reflects the fact that younger preschoolers employ outcome-based concepts of moral goodness and badness that are later replaced by intent-based concepts (Cushman et al., 2013). According to the latter, no conceptual change occurs and the shift can be entirely explained by ancillary changes occurring outside the moral domain, such as in executive functioning (Margoni & Surian, 2016). In this view, younger preschoolers already possess intent-based concepts. However, they fail to rely on them because of the processing demands of the tasks they are tested with that often can be taxing for their developing executive functioning abilities. The child has to inhibit a prepotent outcome-based response and select a less salient intent-based response. To help decide between these views, we developed a novel, simplified moral judgment task with reduced cognitive processing demands. We administered this task to 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children and found that 3-year-olds as well as older children relied mostly on agents’ intentions. Children were presented with movies displaying a puppet show in which the agent either accidentally caused harm or failed to cause harm. Then, they were asked whether the agent was good or bad, and asked to put the agent in the ‘good puppet box’ or the ‘bad puppet box’. When the process of selecting and expressing a response was facilitated (by means of practice trials on the test question), even 3-year-olds sorted puppets according to whether they possessed negative intention, rather than whether they caused negative outcomes. However, when the task was proposed without the practice trials, 3-year-olds performed at chance. These results contradict those views that posit conceptual changes occurring in the moral domain at 4-5 years and provide clear support for conceptual continuity views. Indeed, recent evidence complemented this work by showing intent-based evaluation already in infancy (Hamlin, 2013; Woo et al., 2017). I will conclude by reporting a study on autism that employed the novel moral judgment task we developed. This study showed, for the first time, evidence of intent-based moral judgment in children with autism aged 3-9 years. To sum, this presentation will report a set of recent findings, from populations with typical and atypical development, that help to inform the debate on conceptual continuity and conceptual change in the development of moral cognition.

Authors

• Francesco Margoni, Universitetet i Stavanger
  Presenting Author

• Luca Surian, University of Trento
  Non-Presenting Author