The Role of Adult Testimony in Children's Moral Decision Making

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

Abstract

What does it take for a child to make a moral judgment? Recent work has revealed that when children face conflicts between what they are told and their own perception or knowledge, they often accept the testimony of others in domains of word learning, science and religion (e.g., Lane & Harris, 2014). However, much less is known about how children respond to these types of dilemmas in the social realm, particularly when evaluating the morality of others’ actions.

Research on moral judgment has often focused on children’s ability to identify actions that lead to harm and distress as morally wrong, independent of the dictates of authority (Smetana, 1985; Smetana et al., 2012). However, children’s moral learning is deeply embedded in social, conversational and cultural contexts. Testimony from other people, in particular, can play a key role when learning about the applications or generalizations of moral norms. Here we assess (1) how far children’s judgments about novel moral actions are influenced by adult testimony; (2) the types of moral explanation that are most powerful in changing children’s moral judgments; and (3) the contextual and cultural factors that might affect children’s acceptance of counter-intuitive claims.

In Study 1, we asked 3- to 5-year-old Chinese (N = 124) and U.S. American (N = 90) children to judge whether novel, distress-inducing actions were morally permissible, both independently and after adult informants had made counter-intuitive judgments. Although most participants independently judged the actions to be morally wrong, children from both countries often accepted adult testimony to the contrary and revised their original judgments, F (1, 202) = 70.202, p < .0001, η2p =. 258. Cultural differences and age-related differences will also be discussed.

In Study 2, 198 3- to 5-year-old children in the U.S. heard similar vignettes as in Study 1, in which the protagonists engage in novel actions that make others cry (e.g.,“mibbing”). Then, depending on the condition, children were exposed to an adult speaker who provides Utilitarian explanations that reason about positive consequences Authoritarian explanations that exert power and authority over children, or Control statements. Children also received questions asking for their own moral judgments and explanations, and a true belief task in which they judged the permissibility of the actions in a new context, and decided whether to transmit their judgment to a peer. A significant main effect of Condition was found, F(2, 189) = 11.79, p < .001, η_p^2 = .11, suggesting that children rated the novel actions as more permissible both in the Utilitarian condition and the Authoritarian condition compared to the Control condition. Interestingly, children’s responses in the true belief task were not significantly different from their initial moral judgment scores, suggesting that children’s responses, if updated after hearing the adults’ claims, did not merely signal compliance to authority or the social demands of the task. Taken together, the studies suggested that preschool-aged Chinese and American children were receptive to adult testimony and were likely to accept adult guidance on the interpretation of new or ambiguous harm-related actions.

Authors

• Pearl Han Li, Duke Univeristy
  Presenting Author

• Melissa A. Koenig, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities
  Non-Presenting Author

• Paul Harris, Harvard University
  Non-Presenting Author