Poster #128 - Children’s and Adults’ Reasoning about Prosocial Obligations in Relational Contexts

• In Event: 1-005 - Poster Session 01
  In Poster Session: PS 01 Section - Moral Development

Integrative Statement

Adults feel a deeper obligation to help their friends than to help strangers. If a friend loses her wallet and asks for money, people might consider it mean to not help—but if a stranger asks, the obligation diminishes. Here, we examine whether children’s beliefs about obligation are similarly partial. We address these questions in four studies with children (n = 331) and adults (n = 171).

In Study 1, we ask 5- and 6-year-olds, 8- and 9-year-olds, and adults to evaluate unhelpful others in relational contexts. We presented participants with stories featuring four characters: someone-in-need, a parent, a friend, and a stranger. For example, one story included a child who fell and was hurt. We revealed that none of the characters helped and then asked participants to rate each character on a meanness scale. We found that 5- and 6-year-olds rated all actors as equally mean regardless of relationship (Figure 1), whereas older children and adults rated the parent as most mean followed by the friend and then the stranger.

In Study 2, we considered the possibility that participants expressed differential evaluations of the unhelpful others because all characters were present. It is possible that, if the stranger were the only character who could help, older children and adults would rate the unhelpful parent as mean as the unhelpful stranger. To test this, we provided older children and adults with stories in which the unhelpful character was the only character who saw the person-in-need. We find even in these cases that participants still differentiate between the different characters.

In Study 3, we examine whether younger children’s evaluations are a function of a negativity bias. Do the younger children negatively evaluate unhelpful characters because something bad has occurred, without thinking in terms of obligations at all? We test this by including stories in which someone was in need and either her parent or a stranger did not help, but the unhelpful character lacked knowledge of the incident. We find that all ages rate knowledgeable unhelpful others as meaner than unknowledgeable unhelpful others—but we also find that younger children still rate a knowledgeable unhelpful parent as equally mean as the stranger. These findings suggest that a negativity bias can partially but not entirely account for younger children’s evaluations.

Finally, in Study 4, we examined the degree to which children think that certain actors “have to help” someone. Here, we find a similar pattern as documented for evaluations (Figure 2): younger children and older children alike think parents have to help their children, but younger children think strangers have to help more than older children and adults do.

Together, we interpret these findings to suggest that children’s early third-party moral theory about prosocial obligations is best characterized as impartial, and this may be in part due to a negativity bias in younger children.

Authors

• Julia Marshall, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Paul Bloom, Yale University
  Non-Presenting Author