Poster #48 - The role of group membership on children’s norm understanding

• In Event: Poster Session 07

Abstract

Young children can robustly distinguish between moral and conventional norms (Smetana, 1984; Yucel et al., 2020). Furthermore, group membership influences children’s expectations about whether another child will break or conform to rules (Liberman et al., 2018; Schmidt et al., 2012). For example, children protest against in-group and out-group moral norm violations, but only protest against in-group conventional norm violations (Schmidt et al., 2012). However, little is known as to whether 5- and 6-year-old children would predict moral or conventional transgressors to be in-group or out-group members, evaluate in-group and out-group members' transgressions differently, and expect them to transgress again.

In Study 1, we investigated whether 5- and 6-year-old American children reliably use group membership in evaluating moral, conventional, and arbitrary game rule transgressions. In a counterbalanced order, we presented children (N = 83) with images of in-group (American) and out-group (Turkish) children. In-group children were described as being similar to them (the same hometown, language, and typical games played), and out-group children differed from them in these characteristics. In a randomized order, each child was told about six sets of rule transgressions (2 moral, 2 conventional, and 2 arbitrary game-based rule transgressions). For each scenario, one in-group child and one out-group child were introduced, followed by several questions asking which child committed the transgression, whether the act was permissible, if the transgression would be repeated in the future, and whether the child knows the specific rule attached to the presented norm.

We found that significantly more children in the Moral condition picked the out-group member as the transgressor, t(82) = -2.475, p = .015. Children’s predictions did not significantly differ for Conventional and Game Rule conditions, p = .760 and p = .469 respectively. As expected, children also evaluated moral violation scenarios, but not conventional or game rule violation scenarios as not okay, significantly above chance. We also asked children to predict how the transgressor would behave the next day. Children expected that transgressors would follow all rules significantly above chance. Finally, when asked whether the transgressor knew the rule, most children thought that the transgressor knew the rule.

These results show that young children distinguish between norms in the moral and conventional domains. However, these findings also indicate that children may use group membership differentially based on the strength of the in-group and out-group distinction. Therefore, in an ongoing follow-up study, we strengthened our group membership manipulation and presented young children with two moral norms and two conventional norms. We hypothesize that group membership will interact with children’s responses to moral and conventional norm transgressions, such that children will be more likely to attribute conventional as compared to moral transgressions to the outgroup. These findings tentatively indicate that group membership may play a role in children’s moral/conventional domain distinctions and warrant further investigation.

Authors

• Justin Kim, Duke Univeristy
  Presenting Author

• Meltem Yucel, Duke University

• Xin Alice Zhao, East China Normal University

• Yue Yu, Nanyang Technological University

• Shaun Nichols, Cornell University

• Tamar Kushnir, Duke Univeristy