Poster #59 - The Influence of Others' Counterintuitive Testimony on Preschoolers' Moral Judgments

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Young children can make their own moral decisions, independent of social influences. They judge that moral transgressions such as hitting or stealing would be wrong even where no adult authority or rule forbids it (Smetana et al., 2012). Children disregard others’ explicit instructions and attend to harm and distress an action causes others, when making such autonomous moral judgments (Smetana, 1981). However, recent evidence suggests that under some circumstances, preschoolers can be sensitive to others’ opinions regarding moral judgments. After hearing a counterintuitive testimony that a novel action inducing other’s distress is good, 3- to 5-year-olds defer to it and judge the novel action as less wrong (Li et al., 2019).
How can we resolve the discrepancy between these studies? Children may flexibly decide whether to defer to others’ opinions, depending on the clarity of the causal relationship between an action and its consequences. In Li et al. (2019), the link between a novel action and its outcome might have been ambiguously stated, as in “He mibbed Xiaohong and Xiaohong began to cry.” Note that the sentences stating an action and its outcome were connected by “and”. The children might have inferred simple temporal closeness, not a causal connection, between the action and its outcome and thus might have been more sensitive to social influences than in other previous studies (e.g., Smetana et al., 2012; Turiel, 1983, 2006).
The current research examined this possibility. Five-year-old children first heard stories about a novel transgression. Children in the clear-causality condition heard stories in which the causal relationship between the transgression and its outcome was more clearly stated (e.g., “He mibbed Jiwoo, so Jiwoo began to cry.”). In the unclear-causality condition, the relationship between the transgression and its outcome was ambiguously stated (e.g., “He mibbed Jiwoo and Jiwoo began to cry.”) as in Li et al. (2019). Then all children received an informant trial in which they watched a video in which an informant provided the counterintuitive testimony about the action (e.g., “It was good to mib”) and a control trial in which they watched a video without the informant’s testimony about the action. The order of trials was counterbalanced across participants. Finally, they were asked whether the novel action was wrong or not.
The results showed that children in the clear-causality condition were significantly more likely to judge the novel action as wrong than those in the unclear-causality condition. In the clear-causality condition, children were no more likely to judge the action as less wrong in the informant trial than in the control trial, suggesting that children could ignore the informant’s counterintuitive testimony. In the unclear-causality condition, children rated the action significantly more positively in the informant trial than in the control trial. Our findings suggest that 5-year-olds can incorporate others’ testimony in a flexible manner when making moral judgments, depending on how readily they can infer a causal link between transgressions and harmful outcomes.

Authors

• Seul-kee Jung, Yonsei University

• Hyun-Joo Song, Yonsei University
  Presenting Author