Dissociating Children's Moral Evaluations and Affiliative Decision-Making in Intergroup Exclusion

• In Event: Balancing Belonging, Fairness, and Cost in Children's Preferences and Predictions About Affiliative Behaviours

Abstract

From early in infancy, human beings show a remarkable sensitivity to the social orientation of others, preferring agents that behave prosocially to those that behave antisocially (e.g. Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). These early expectations and behaviours regarding fairness and justice form a set of core moral principles that children and adults use to guide our intuitive judgments of others. Alongside this, we are also profoundly influenced by the importance of groups to our social organization; groups shape our identities and our prosocial behaviour and provide us a fundamental sense of belonging, and mere membership in a group can drive many observed ingroup biases (Dunham, 2018).
Thus, although our moral convictions are important to us, considerations for what is fair may sometimes conflict with other factors in social contexts. As a result, group norms are often balanced against a general preference for fairness in moral decision-making (Killen & Rutland, 2011). To the degree that people have competing motives for social behaviour, it may therefore be possible to be aware of a person’s moral status (good or bad), but to nevertheless not use it when making one’s own affiliative decisions when other social pressures are present.
To investigate this question, we developed a ball-throwing task between three simulated characters that participants observe. In the task, two characters (belonging to one minimal group) always exclude a third character (belonging to another minimal group). This occurs after the third character has behaved antisocially, prosocially, or when no information about the third character was present. Participants are then assigned to a minimal group that belongs either to one of the two minimal groups from the task, or a new unaffiliated group. They are then asked who they would throw to in the game.
Data collected from adults (N = 201) suggests that, while they evaluate both ingroup and outgroup members that behave prosocially on this task more positively, and those behaving selfishly more negatively (F = 23.4, p < 0.001), their affiliative choices are insensitive to this moral evaluation (F = 13.7, p < 0.001) and systematically favour ingroup members (F = 7.8, p < 0.001). Nevertheless, participants who cite fairness principles when explaining their choices favour excluded characters (F = 22.3, p < 0.001).
While prior minimal-group paradigms have shown that a child’s mere membership in a group can induce biased attitudes, mentalization about group norms and loyalty is still developing in younger school-age children. Thus, younger children may tend to make affiliative decisions based on moral judgments alone, while older children may integrate expectations of group loyalty in their decision-making.
Following our adult sample, we will test 6- to 9-year-old children on the task. Power analysis indicates a necessary sample size of N = 102, which will be collected through online moderated video calls with children from October to February. These findings will shed light on how affiliative choices may proceed even in the absence of positive evaluations of ingroup members, and offer evidence for an emergence of a generic norm of favouring one’s ingroup.

Authors

• Rebekah Gelpí, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Wei Ai, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• Arnav Verma, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

• William A. Cunningham, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author

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