Children’s Sensitivity to Physical and Cognitive Disability Status when Judging Norm Violations

• In Event: Children's Understanding of Group Dynamics: Group Norms and Group Membership

Abstract

Before the age of 5, children fail to consider others’ disability status when making judgments about moral or conventional violations. In one study (Huckstadt & Shutts, 2014), participants were presented with a scenario in which a group of characters had to play a game by peeking to see what toy is hidden in a box. Everyone followed the game rule except for two: one blind character and one typically-developing character who instead opened the box and felt the animal toy inside with their hands. Children rated both rule-violators as more wrong than a typically developing child who followed the rule, but did not differentiate between the two. Children only begin to differentiate the violators and rated the child with disability as less wrong at around age 5 (Granata et al., 2022). Here, we built on these findings and asked three main questions: First, do children aged 5-8 years old consistently consider a person’s disability status across scenarios involving both physical and cognitive disabilities? Second, do children expect the norm-violating behavior to endure across time (i.e., they will always play that way because the disability is stable and they couldn’t play the game otherwise)? Last, will children generalize the behavior to other individuals with the same disability?
In Study 1, we focused on three physical disabilities (blindness, deafness, physical paralysis). In each scenario, a group of children were playing a game with a certain rule that would make it impossible for the character with disability to succeed (having to peek inside a box to guess what animal is inside, listen to guess what animal made a particular sound, kick a ball into a goal). Our results suggest that older children (7-8yo) consistently rated the disabled child (dis-violate) to be less wrong than the typically-developing child who violated the game rule (typ-violate). This effect is only marginally significant in the younger age group (5-6yo). Moreover, children in both age groups were more likely to say that the dis-violate character, but not the typ-violate character, would always violate the game rule. Presumably, children understand that the disabilities presented here are stable. Children also think that a new child with the same disability would play the game like the dis-violate character instead of following the rule.
In Study 2 we presented children with scenarios involving cognitive disabilities (ADHD, learning disability, speech difficulties). We found that children in both age groups rated the two violating characters as more wrong than the same characters in Study 1, and they rated the typ-violate character as more wrong than the dis-violate character. Compared to Study 1, children were less likely to expect the dis-violate to always violate the game rule in the future; they also did not think that a new child with the same disability would also play the game differently.
Together, these results suggest that beginning at age 5, children consider the disability status of a person when making judgments about a norm violation. However, children may understand physical disabilities better than cognitive disabilities.

Authors

• Fransisca Ting, University of Toronto

• Aarti Bodas, Boston University
  Presenting Author

• Lana Harfouche, Boston University

• Deb Kelemen, Boston University