Children’s assessment of morally ambiguous characters

• In Event: Prosocial = good? Children’s developing evaluations of prosocial actions

Abstract

Children’s stories frequently depict moral behavior and teach moral lessons. Past research has mainly focused on children’s assessment of unambiguously prosocial or antisocial agents, showing that infants, toddlers, and preschoolers positively evaluate and prefer prosocial over antisocial agents (e.g., Dahl et al., 2013; Hamlin & Wynn, 2011). Yet real people’s behavior is typically morally ambiguous, involving both prosocial and antisocial actions, and less is known about how children assess morally ambiguous agents.

In two studies, we examined how children interpret and respond to morally ambiguous characters. In Study 1, 72 American children (24 four-year-olds, 24 six-year-olds, and 24 eight-year-olds) heard two stories that each contained a moral character (who performed two positive actions), an immoral character (two negative actions), and a morally ambiguous character (one positive action and one negative action). Children’s preferences for, and judgments of, each character varied with age, F(4,138)=16.63, p<.001. Six- and 8-year-olds were more likely than 4-year-olds to strongly prefer the moral character over the ambiguous and immoral characters, ps<.001. In direct comparisons, 6- and 8-year-olds rated the moral character as “best” and “nicest” and the immoral character as “meanest” more frequently than 4-year-olds.

In Study 2, 36 American children (18 four-year-olds, 18 six-year-olds) were read a single story about the actions of a moral character, an immoral character, and an ambiguous character. Differing from Study 1, we varied the ambiguous character’s actions: the majority of their actions were either positive (two positive actions and one negative action) or negative (one positive action and two negative actions). Overall, children preferred the moral character over both the ambiguous and the immoral character, all ps<.001, but did not prefer the ambiguous over the immoral character, p=.122. However, children’s preferences for, and judgments of, each character again varied with age. Compared to 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds more strongly preferred the moral character, p=.013, and more strongly disliked the immoral character, p=.018. For the ambiguous character, there were no main effects of age or character type (majority positive vs. majority negative), and no interaction, ps>.100. Four-year-olds did not differentiate between the three characters in their preferences, p=.156, but 6-year-olds preferred the moral character over the ambiguous and immoral, ps<.001, and preferred the ambiguous character over the immoral character, p=.013.

These results show that older children distinguish between moral behavior, immoral behavior, and morally ambiguous behavior. Younger children, however, do not reliably make the same distinctions as older children. Notably, our findings on young children’s weaker explicit judgments of (im)moral and ambiguous characters stands in contrast to infants’ stronger implicit judgments of (im)moral characters in the literature (e.g., Hamlin et al., 2007) and warrants further attention.
The observed age-related changes in children’s evaluations of morally ambiguous behavior in fictional stories may indicate the development of their real-world assessments of the “gray areas” of morality. Given that in real life, people are typically not just heroes or villains, more work should investigate how children evaluate morally ambiguous individuals.

Authors

• Meltem Yucel, Duke University
  Presenting Author

• Sierra Eisen, Wesleyan University

• Jessica A Stern, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Angeline S Lillard, University of Virginia - Charlottesville

• Amrisha Vaish, University of Virginia - Charlottesville