Preschool Children’s Moral Judgments About Retaliation and Their Relation to Executive Function

• In Event: Young children's moral judgements and prosocial behaviors

Abstract

Mature moral reasoning reflects an understanding that harmful acts are wrong independent of authority or society rules (Smetana, Jambon, & Ball, 2013). Children understand that unprovoked acts of harm are morally wrong by the age of 3, but the moral concept of retaliation continues to develop through preschool (Gasser, Malti, & Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, 2012). Children judge types of harm differently, stating that unprovoked physical harm is more serious than psychological harm (Smetana et al., 1999). EF may support children’s judgments about complex moral situations, including retaliatory harm (Richardson, Mulvey, & Killen, 2012). Moral judgments of different types of retaliation may be moderated by preschool children’s level of EF during the time both constructs undergo a period of rapid development (Carlson, 2005) and children begin to engage in more sophisticated social interactions (Raikes et al., 2013).
Eighty-six children between the ages of 47 and 62 months completed a social situation interview (Ball & Smetana, 2018). The interview consisted of stories about three retaliatory transgressions— physical (e.g., hit), verbal (e.g., yell), relational (e.g., social exclusion) — in response to an unprovoked resource transgression (e.g., a peer taking away a toy). Following each story, participants used a 5-point Likert scale to answer four judgment questions about the retaliatory transgression: acceptability, deserved punishment, and two criterion judgments that indicate the maturity of the moral concept (i.e., authority and rule independence). Participants also completed three EF tasks, the scores of which were combined and dichotomized into “low EF” and “high EF” groups.
A 2 (between-subjects: EF group) x 3 (within-subjects: retaliation type) x 3 (within-subjects: judgment type) mixed ANOVA revealed a main effect of judgment type, F(2, 84) = 56.58, p < .001, η2p = .40. Follow up pairwise comparisons revealed that acceptability judgments (M=4.25, SE=0.10) were significantly higher than the average of the two criterion judgments (M=3.61, SE=0.10), which in turn were higher than deserved punishment judgments (M=3.04, SE=0.12). Notably, there was no significant interaction between judgment type and retaliation type, F(6, 84) = 0.30, p = .88. There was a significant interaction between retaliation type and EF, F(2, 84) = 3.85, p= .02, η2p = .04 (Figure 1) such that low EF children had higher physical retaliation judgments (M= 3.73, SE=0.16) compared to verbal (M=3.48, SE=0.18) and relational (M=3.38, SE=0.16) judgments. High EF children did not differ in their ratings by retaliation type (Mphysical= 3.61, Mverbal= 3.80, Mrelational= 3.79, all ps > .10).
The results suggest that preschool children do not have a mature moral concept regarding retaliation regardless of type because they rated the acts as more acceptable when authority figures and rules do not prohibit the act. The results further suggest that EF supports children’s ability to reason about non-physical acts of retaliation. These acts do not elicit consistent moral feedback from authority figures compared to physical harm (Bell & Willis, 2016). Consequently, children cannot rely on simple rote feedback to inform their reasoning and may also need cognitive control to recognize subtle moral cues in the environment.

Authors

• Jessica Stark Caporaso, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Presenting Author

• Courtney Leighann Ball, University of Notre Dame
  Non-Presenting Author

• Stuart Marcovitch, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Non-Presenting Author