Children's and adults' information-seeking behavior about morally relevant actions

• In Event: The interplay of mental states and moral cognition

Abstract

Adults' moral judgments show sensitivity to intent (Young et al., 2007), while young children often attend more to outcome than to intent (Killen et al., 2011). Prior literature suggests a shift from outcome to intent-based moral judgment between the ages of 4 and 8 years (Cushman, 2008), but how children in this developmental period seek information about intent remains to be seen, as actors' intentions are not always clear in everyday interactions. The present studies investigated the extent to which individuals seek information about prosocial behaviors and moral transgressions committed with unclear intent and asked how that desire changes across age.
Study 1 recruited 80 4- to 6-year-olds, 80 7- to 9-year-olds, and 192 adults. All participants learned about characters who performed either transgressions or prosocial behaviors with unclear motives (e.g. saying something mean versus nice about another person's drawing for unstated reasons). Participants indicated the behavior about which they would prefer to obtain more information (e.g., whether they would prefer to learn why the pro-social behavior or the transgression occurred) and then reported how much they wanted to learn about the behavior they selected. We coded responses on a scale from -2.5 (indicating the strongest desire to learn about why the transgression occurred) to +2.5 (indicating the strongest desire to learn about why the pro-social behavior occurred). A one-way, three-level (Participant Age: younger children vs. older children vs. adults) ANOVA found a main effect of age: older children reported a greater desire to obtain information about moral transgressions than adults. Additionally, while older children and adults preferred to acquire information about transgressions rather than pro-social behaviors, younger children's responses did not differ from chance (Fig. 1).
Building on these results, Study 2 investigated a potential mechanism differentiating younger and older children’s information-seeking behavior. Because expectation violation often triggers information-seeking (Kidd, 2005), children’s expectations for future behavior might predict their information-seeking about prosocial behaviors or transgressions. This study recruited 80 younger and older children that completed a procedure similar to Study 1, except individuals indicated whether they expected prosocial or transgressional behaviors to occur in a series of vignettes preceding Study 1's dependent measures. Study 2 replicated the effect found in Study 1: older participants showed stronger preferences to learn about why transgressions occurred than did younger children. However, expectations for future behavior did not significantly mediate the relationship between information-seeking and age (Fig. 2).
These results demonstrate a desire among older children and adults to learn about transgressions. This effect may not be present in younger children because they place less emphasis on intent than do older participants when making moral judgments and may therefore experience less curiosity about why behaviors occur. Additionally, Study 2 suggests that individuals evaluate morally relevant actions differently from other behaviors that generally trigger information-seeking behavior, as expectations for future behavior did not appear to reliably predict a desire to learn about why particular behaviors occurred. Future work will test an alternative mechanismpunishmentthat might underlie the age-related differences observed in the present studies.

Authors

• Daniel Yonas, Columbia University
  Presenting Author

• Larisa Heiphetz Solomon, Columbia University