Moral Behavior Within and Across Social Groups

• In Event: The Role of Social Relationships in Shaping Children’s Socio-Moral Reasoning

Abstract

Social groups powerfully shape children’s expectations of moral behavior. Starting within the first few years of life, children view groups as marking people who hold moral obligations toward one another (Rhodes & Chalik, 2013). This belief presents a fundamental challenge: Given that there exist countless possible ways to divide up the social world, children must determine which social distinctions constrain moral obligation. This talk will address how children accomplish this task by discussing two studies conducted using the online platform, Lookit.

In Study 1 (n = 204), we introduced children to two novel groups, marked by color and label, and asked them to predict whether behaviors would occur within or across social group boundaries. We asked children about behaviors directly relevant to moral obligation: nice behaviors, such as sharing, and mean behaviors, such as hitting. Younger children (ages 3-5) predicted that people would direct mean behaviors toward members of the opposing group (Chi^2 (1) = 8.24, p < .005), but did not have systematic expectations about how nice behaviors would play out (p = 0.55). Older children, on the other hand, predicted that people would both direct mean behaviors toward members of the opposing group (Chi^2 (1) = 12.75, p = < .001) and direct nice behaviors toward members of the ingroup (Chi^2 (1) = 23.82, p < .001; see Figure 1).

In Study 2 (n = 188, data collection ongoing), children performed the same task as in Study 1, except that the questions regarded gender and racial groups, rather than novel groups. Younger children predicted between-gender (Chi^2 (1) = 4.73, p = < .05) and within-race (Chi^2 (1) = 3.87, p = < .05) mean behaviors, whereas older children held no systematic expectations for mean behaviors for either group distinction (gender, p = .99; race, p = .54). No children of any age held systematic expectations for how nice behaviors would play out in reference to gender (p = .15) or racial (p = .62) groups (see Figure 1).

These findings demonstrate that children develop different expectations for how moral behaviors will play out, depending on the type of social group that they are considering. Overall, children have stronger expectations for mean behaviors than for nice behaviors, consistent with evolutionary and philosophical arguments that humans’ primary moral obligation is to avoid harm to ingroup members and protect them from harm. Yet, as children gain experience in their own cultural environments, this prioritization changes. They begin to see nice behaviors as morally-obligated actions occurring among members of the same novel group, but as irrelevant to their predictions for racial and gender groups. The implications of these findings for the study of moral cognition, and for the study of social categorization more broadly, will be discussed.

Author

• Lisa Chalik, Skidmore College
  Presenting Author