Poster #83 - Children consider social relationships when evaluating moral behaviors

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Social relationships can provide joy, fulfillment, and even moral dilemmas. Consider a person Finn, who: 1) fails to wish their close friend a happy birthday, 2) avoids visiting their child in the hospital, and 3) does not congratulate their romantic partner on a recent career success. It may seem like Finn is a bad person. But, if “their close friend/child/romantic partner” were replaced with “a stranger,” then Finn might not seem quite as bad. Indeed, recent research has shown that older children (8- to 9-year-olds) and adults consider social relationships when making moral evaluations: they say that it is worse for a friend (than a stranger) to fail to help someone in need (Marshall et al., 2020). Here, we replicate these findings and ask whether a similar pattern is seen for another important moral behavior: lying.

Three- to 12-year-old children (n = 232) and adults (n = 60) were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: Failing to Help, or Lying. Participants saw three vignettes, each featuring a novel protagonist and two social partners: one social partner was the protagonist’s friend, and the other was the protagonist’s classmate. In the Failing to Help condition, both the friend and the classmate decided not to help the protagonist in need (vignettes from Marshall et al., 2020). In the Lying condition, both the friend and classmate told the protagonist an antisocial lie (e.g., they said that did not like the protagonist’s snack, even though they actually liked it). For each vignette, participants provided individual evaluations of both social partners’ behavior (on a scale from Really Bad (0), to Really Good (5)), and made comparative evaluations by selecting which of the two social partners was meaner.

Children generally rated lying and failing to help negatively. But, evaluations of the social partners’ behaviors did vary based on relationship: children were more likely to say that the friend’s behavior was bad, and differences in ratings of the friend and the classmate became larger with age. The effect of relationship was significant by middle childhood (6- to 8-years; Figure 1). Comparative evaluations revealed a similar pattern: by 6- to 8-years, children evaluated a friend who lied or failed to help as meaner than a classmate who engaged in the same behavior (see Figure 2). Taken together, these findings replicate prior work demonstrating that relationships impact humans’ moral judgments, even starting in childhood. The present work also extends the literature by showing that social relationships impact moral evaluations (i) in a new domain (lying), and (ii) earlier in development than previously reported. Children’s individual and comparative moral evaluations appear to incorporate social relationships at similar points in ontogeny (6- to 8-years) and these effects strengthen into adulthood. Future research can investigate the extent of these effects by investigating additional moral behaviors, as well as other pertinent social relationships.

Authors

• Rodney Tompkins, University of California - Santa Barbara
  Presenting Author

• Zoe Liberman, University of California - Santa Barbara