Group Bias in Children’s Evaluation of Third-party Punishment

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

Abstract

With age children develop the willingness to enforce justice as well as in-group favoritism. When evaluating moral transgressions, 3- to 6-year-old children show in-group favoritism for both the seriousness of transgressions and the quality of the perpetrator. At around age 6 children show in-group favoritism when they exercise punishment as an uninvolved third-party. In real life, most individuals lack the power to punish moral transgressions. Instead, they often enforce moral norms by choosing to whom to grant the power (e.g., through election, petition) and by monitoring and evaluating the fairness of the authorities’ sanctioning. Yet there exists no empirical study to date that examines factors such as group bias that influence individuals’ evaluation of third-party punishment. The current study examined in-group favoritism in children’s evaluation of third-party punishment when the group affiliation of perpetrators and victims varied.
In this study (N = 197, age 3-7), children were first told they were assigned to a yellow team and were given a yellow t-shirt to put on. Then children listened to a moral transgression story accompanied by pictures about a perpetrator physically hurting a victim. The color of the perpetrator’s and the victim’s t-shirts determined their group relationship with the participating children (i.e., the evaluator): in-group characters wore a yellow t-shirt and out-group characters wore a blue t-shirt. Children were told that a teacher took away the perpetrator’s five cookies as a punishment. After the story, children were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of the teacher’s punishment. They were also asked to judge how serious was the transgression, whether the perpetrator deserved punishment, as well as how many cookies they would take away from the perpetrator.
As we expected, across all age groups, children showed in-group favoritism when evaluating third-party punishment. They evaluated a harsh punishment as being more appropriate when it was enforced on an out-group perpetrator (i.e., blue team) than an in-group one (i.e., yellow team), regardless of the group affiliation of the victim. Children also showed in-group favoritism in judging the deserved punishment of a transgression and in allocating third-party punishment themselves, based on the group affiliation of the perpetrator, but not the victim. In addition, older children evaluated third-party punishment as more appropriate, and judged a transgression as being more serious and deserve more punishment than did younger children.
Taken together, this study provides new evidence that group bias is rooted deeply in moral development and that moral evaluation is biased even at its emergence.

Authors

• Yunru Ma, Cornell University
  Presenting Author

• Qi Wang, Cornell University
  Non-Presenting Author