Tattling as Punishment: Young Children Tattle to Enforce Moral Norms

• In Event: 2-141 - How do Children Intervene Against Moral Transgressions?: The Development of Third-party Interventions in Childhood

Integrative Statement

Human cooperation relies on the enforcement of cooperative norms, often through acts of punishment such as ostracism, shunning, and withholding resources (Boyd & Richerson, 2005). Such norm enforcement is evident remarkably early in ontogeny: Children readily enforce norms - even in third-party contexts, i.e., when they themselves are unaffected by the transgression. For instance, children withhold help and desirable resources from, give aversive resources to, and protest against non-cooperators (e.g., Kenward & Östh, 2014; Olson & Spelke, 2008).

We examined a less well-studied form of norm enforcement: tattling, or reporting to a second party about norm violations committed by a third party (Ingram & Bering, 2010). Tattling allows children to inform others about moral transgressions rather than take on perpetrators directly and risk retaliation, thus making it a less risky form of norm enforcement for young children. We present two studies on young children’s tattling.

In Study 1 (conducted in Germany), 3-year-olds (N = 32) saw an actor puppet destroying either an object that belonged to a victim puppet (Harm condition) or belonged to nobody (Control condition) while the victim was away. When the victim returned, children tattled significantly more to her about the actor’s actions in the Harm than Control condition (p = .007). This hints that tattling may be an additional way for children to enforce norms.

Importantly, however, as the victim in Study 1 was absent during the transgression and did not know who caused the harm, an alternative possibility is that children were worried that the victim would blame them and so felt the need to inform the victim about who caused the harm. Tattling may thus be a self-serving rather than a cooperative act.

To examine this possibility, we asked in a second study (conducted in the United States): If children know they cannot be blamed for the transgression, will they still tattle? Towards this end, we devised a situation in which the objects that the actor would destroy were placed in a locked box that the puppets had keys for but the child did not, and everyone (including the victim and the child) knew this.

As in Study 1, 3-year-olds (N = 32) watched an actor destroy a victim’s belongings (Harm condition) or neutral objects (Control condition) while the victim was away. However, this time, it was clear (and reiterated several times) that the child could not have accessed the objects in the locked box and thus could not have destroyed them. The child thus did not need to tattle simply to avoid being blamed. Nonetheless, when the victim returned, significantly more children tattled in the Harm than Control condition, p = .002 (Figure 1). Moreover, there were no cases of ‘selfish tattling,’ (tattling solely to avoid being blamed, e.g., “It wasn’t me”). Note also that the condition difference in tattling emerged both in Germany and the U.S., demonstrating its robustness.

Together, these results suggest that young children’s tattling in third-party contexts serves to enforce moral norms and thus helps uphold cooperation.

Authors

• Amrisha Vaish, The University of Virginia
  Presenting Author

• Meltem Yucel, University of Virginia
  Non-Presenting Author