Children’s Inferences of Moral Character Across Different Moral Sub-Domains

• In Event: Mental State Understanding and Moral Development

Abstract

Character traits can be beneficial when utilized as abstract tools to navigate our social worlds; they can help us to infer the behaviour we can expect from an individual in the future (Heyman & Gelman, 1998). Even though young children may not reliably use trait terms (Heyman & Gelman, 1998), they may show an implicit understanding of traits by demonstrating behavioral generalizations across different contexts. We investigated children’s understanding of character traits in moral domain. In the current experiment, after watching a resource distribution in which a character distributed resources equally (i.e., fairly) to two individuals, or unequally to two individuals (i.e., unfairly), we showed 4- to 7-year-old children a scenario in which the same individual either helped another actor retrieve her toy from a box or hindered her in doing so. Children were then asked if protagonist’s behaviour in the help/hinder scenario was surprising. Our prediction was that if children appreciate moral character, they should be surprised following fair behavior (but not unfair behavior) when the protagonist hindered the actor, and they should be surprised following unfair behavior (but not fair behavior) when the protagonist helped the actor. Children also received tasks that measured their ability to understand the emotion of surprise at a conceptual level; here we predicted that children with a clear conceptual understanding of surprise would be more likely to demonstrate the predicted pattern of findings. Children’s reaction to the test event varied based on whether it was morally consistent with the familiarization event, χ2 (1, N = 82) = 8.72, p = .004. This overall effect was marginally present across both the fair and unfair conditions, χ2 (1, N = 43) = 4.37, p = .062, and χ2 (1, N = 39) = 4.36, p = .054, respectively. Critically, as Figure 1 shows, children were more likely to be unsurprised by a morally consistent event than (p = 0.041 for both conditions), than they were to be surprised by a morally inconsistent event, p > .65, for both conditions. Next, we investigated whether children’s conceptual understanding of surprise was related to whether they reported being surprise in the moral character task. As Table 1 indicates, children did not differ in their understanding of false belief, in their predictions of what would cause another person’s surprise and in their explanations of why another person was surprised based on whether or not they succeeded in the moral character task. These findings suggest that children’s ability to report surprise on the basis of moral inconsistency/consistency, does not depend on their conceptual understanding of surprise. Together, these findings elucidate our understanding of the development of children’s inferences about moral character, showing that even young children expect consistency in moral behavior across different sub-domains. Moreover, our results show that the moral character task implemented in this study is appropriate for use with even young children, as it does not hinge on a conceptual understanding of surprise.

Authors

• Inderpreet Kaur Gill, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Aisling Curtin, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jessica A Sommerville, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author