Toddlers Draw Moral Character Inferences about an Antisocial Individual and Her Group

• In Event: Inferences drawn from moral actions in infants and children

Abstract

Recent findings indicate that toddlers hold moral expectations about how individuals will treat others. For example, they expect a person to divide resources fairly between similar recipients. In the current study, we asked what inferences toddlers draw about the moral character of an individual who violates one of these expectations, and whether they would generalize these inferences to members of her group and expect them to share the same poor moral character.

In Experiment 1, we presented 2-year-olds with live scenes where one individual would harm a victim. Across conditions, we varied the number of harmful actions performed by the individual (one or three actions) and the group membership of the victim (ingroup or outgroup, relative to the individual). Next, the individual divided resources between two recipients either fairly or unfairly. We reasoned that if toddlers perceived the individual’s initial action(s) as a violation of the harm-avoidance principle, they may infer that the individual has a poor moral character and may no longer expect her to adhere to a different moral principle. We found that following one harm directed at an outgroup victim, toddlers still expect the individual to be fair. However, this expectation goes away following one harm directed at an ingroup victim, or three harms directed at either an ingroup or an outgroup victim. These results suggest that early in development, children may not necessarily view a mild harmful action as a moral violation. Additionally, toddlers can make inferences about an individual’s moral character following a moral violation and aptly revise their expectations about the individual’s future actions.

Experiment 2 provided converging evidence: Here, 2-year-olds who saw an individual harm an ingroup victim three times viewed it as unexpected when the individual later behaved generously by giving away the majority of a desirable resource to a new recipient. This suggests that not only do toddlers no longer expect a person with a poor moral character to adhere to other moral principles, but they also find it unexpected when this individual goes above and beyond what is obligated to them.

In Experiment 3, we tested 18-month-old toddlers and asked if toddlers would also make inferences about the moral character of an individual’s ingroup after she committed a moral violation. Here, infants watched video stimuli involving individuals in green or pink shirts. One person from the green group deliberately or accidentally knocked down a tower built by the pink group. Next, a member of the blue group tripped and was helped by either a new green-group member or a new pink-group member. In the deliberate condition, toddlers looked significantly longer at the green help event, suggesting that they inferred that people who belonged to the same group may share the same moral character. This effect was not found in the accidental condition.

Together, these findings suggest that after viewing an individual commit a moral violation, toddlers draw inferences about the moral character of the individual and expect others belonging to the same group to share the same character.

Authors

• Fransisca Ting, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Peipei Setoh, Nanyang Technological University

• Melody Buyukozer Dawkins, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Olivia Spence

• Renee Baillargeon, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign