How do Storybooks and Testimony Impact Children’s Fairness Principles?

• In Event: How Children Learn about the Social World from Others' Messages

Abstract

Can storybooks and direct testimony – two common sources of information about the world – alter children’s inclinations toward equality-based or merit-based forms of resource distribution? Storybooks are frequently effective vehicles of belief change in childhood (Hopkins & Weisberg, 2017), and can affect children’s altruistic giving (Steinbeis & Over, 2017). Yet, many television shows and written narratives are ineffective in teaching children moral lessons (Mares & Acosta, 2008). Our earlier research (citation redacted for masked review) has suggested that children may derive greater benefits from more direct and straightforward forms of verbal communication, or “testimony” (see Harris, 2012). However, there were several fundamental differences between the storybooks and the testimony in our prior studies that prevent drawing strong conclusions from their comparison. In the present study, we investigated whether forms of storybooks and direct testimony that were more closely matched in content would have similar or differential impacts in leading children to value one form of fairness (e.g., equality) above another (e.g., merit).

Six- to eight-year-old children’s (N=77) fairness preferences were evaluated with third-party distribution tasks immediately before and after a storybook or testimony intervention, as well as after a delay of 2–4 weeks. These tasks required children to distribute eight prizes between a child who had completed 25% of a task and a child who had completed 75% of a task. In contrast to our previous research, in which storybooks involved beavers dividing wood and testimony involved direct instruction about the distribution task (thus mismatching both content and format), the storybooks and testimony in the present research each involved a schoolteacher who decided to divide prizes either equally or meritoriously amongst her students.

Results indicated that, collapsing across conditions, the interventions reliably led children to change their distribution patterns (shifting from merit and equality, or vice versa) from pre-test to post-test, p<.001 (46.75% change), and from pre-test to delayed post-test, p<.001, (58.82% change). A significant change was found for each of the interventions preaching equality, both at the initial post-test and the delayed post-test, ps<.001. For the interventions preaching merit, significant changes did not occur at the immediate post-test ps>.05, although they did at the delayed post-test, ps<.05. A logistic regression indicated that changes in resource distribution differed across the two kinds of Fairness, p=.042, with equality interventions being more effective, but not across the two kinds of Intervention (Storybook vs. Testimony), p=.212.

These findings confirm that children readily learn moral lessons from social communication, and that belief change can endure for at least several weeks. Equality-based interventions are especially effective, perhaps because equality is a potent default principle. However, despite a stark difference between storybooks and testimony that was found in our previous research, this study indicated that closely-matched storybooks and testimony are similarly effective in their power to change children’s fairness preferences. While storybooks may be compelling as sources of immersive entertainment, it is apparently the moral lesson, rather than the story itself, that serves as the critical factor influencing children’s tendencies to prefer a particular moral stance.

Authors

• Joshua Rottman, Franklin & Marshall College
  Presenting Author

• Valerie Zizik, Franklin & Marshall College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kelly Minard, Franklin & Marshall College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Liane Young, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author

• Peter R. Blake, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Deb Kelemen, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author