Poster #72 - Examining the Influence of False Belief Understanding and Empathy on Moral Judgements

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

Sometime during the preschool years, most children begin to display understanding of their own and others’ mental states such as desires, beliefs, intentions, and emotions. This Theory of Mind (ToM) allows them to understand, explain, and predict others’ and their own behavior (Premack & Woodruff, 1978) and is critical for other domains of social functioning, like, moral reasoning and moral judgment. Another aspect of social cognition that may be helpful in making moral judgments is empathy. Even though most research focuses on the influence of behavioral and cognitive processes, research suggests that affective processes, such as empathy, are also important for complex moral judgments (Hoffman, 2000).

Here we examined how ToM and individual differences in empathy may influence moral judgments for children (5- and 7-year-olds) and adults in morally-relevant vignettes in which a character’s intent is misaligned with the outcome due to a false belief.

Participants (n = 61 children, n = 36 adults), were randomly assigned to one of two intent conditions (good or bad); in the good intent condition the character has a good intent but due to a false belief ends up giving a friend a negatively-valenced item, and in the bad intent condition the character has a bad intent but ends up giving a friend a positively-valenced item. After each vignette, participants made judgments of moral intent, deserved consequences, and deserved praise or blame for the characters. In order to assess whether individual differences in empathy were related to children’s moral judgments, parents completed a parent-report measure of child empathy (Griffith Empathy Measure; Dadds et al., 2008).

We hypothesized that: 5-year-olds would show little understanding of consequence evaluation in false belief contexts, whereas 7-year-olds would differentiate their consequence evaluation based on intent; assigning blame and praise would be easier because they may have more experience with this than assigning consequences, and therefore younger children would be able to make adult-like judgments. Lastly, we explored the relation between parent-reported empathy and children’s moral judgments.

All groups made appropriate intent judgments, but 7-year-olds were more likely than 5-year-olds to identify the agent’s false belief. For consequence judgments, we only found a main effect on intent, such that participants deemed agents in the bad intent condition as more deserving of a negative consequence than agents in the good intent condition. As hypothesized, even 5-year-olds blamed the agent in the bad intent condition and praised the agent in the good intent condition and did so to the same extent as older children and adults. Parent-reported child empathy was not related to blame and praise judgments, but was related to consequence judgments. Generally, children with higher parent-reported empathy were influenced more by the outcome than by intent: they tended to assign a positive consequence to the agent when the outcome was good and a negative consequence when the outcome was bad. Our findings suggest that integrating theory of mind and moral judgment is a multi-faceted developmental achievement that unfolds only gradually over childhood and may be influenced by both cognitive and affective factors.

Authors

• Karlena D Ochoa, University of California - Irvine
  Presenting Author

• Kathryn Mills, University of Oregon

• Louis J Moses, Victoria University of Wellington