Forgiving and Retaliatory Responses Toward Conventional Rule Breaking: The Role of Theory of Mind

• In Event: An Integrative Perspective on the link between Theory of Mind and Moral Development

Abstract

Human societies are bound together and regulated by rules and norms (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003). Rulebreakers have the potential to disrupt the social norms necessary for regular and positive social functioning and, therefore, must be dealt with by others in their society. There are many ways to deal with a rulebreaker, including both punishment and forgiveness. How we decide what reactions towards rule breaking are appropriate and how these decision-making processes develop are important considerations. One proposed mechanism is theory of mind (ToM), which children draw upon when making many forms of moral and social judgments (Killen et al., 2011), including nuanced judgments of forgiveness following exclusion (Mulvey et al., 2022). However, little research has looked at possible reactions that children may have toward rule-breakers, including forgiveness as well as types of retaliation. Therefore, the current study aimed to examine children’s judgments of how fair differing reactions toward rule breaking are as well as the role of ToM in their evaluations. We hypothesized that with increasing ToM competence, children would make more nuanced judgments.
The current ongoing study presented children (M = 82.05 months, SD = 21.27, N = 45, 21 female and 24 male; 40% White/European American, 15.6% Asian/Asian American, 13.33% multiracial, 11.1% Black/African American, 11.1% Latinx, and 9% Other) with scenarios involving individuals breaking the rules of games, i.e. conventional violations, in ways that did not cause direct harm to the other player. Children were presented with seven possible reactions of the non-rule breaker. These included forgiving the rulebreaker, not forgiving the rulebreaker, hitting the rulebreaker, playing the game the same way the rulebreaker did, telling the teacher, quitting the game, and ignoring the rulebreaker. They then indicated on a six-point Likert scale (1=Not at all fair to 6= A lot fair) how fair or unfair it would be for the non-rule breaker to do each action in response to the rulebreaker. They then completed a first-order ToM task and the total number of correct responses to this task (0-2) was recorded. Next, a series of regressions with each of the reaction fairness ratings as the dependent variable, ToM level as a predictor, and age in months as a covariate, were run. ToM significantly predicted how fair the child thought playing the game the same way, telling the teacher, and quitting the game were (all p ≤ .042). Children with higher levels of ToM found playing the same way to be more fair, while they found telling the teacher and quitting the game to be less fair, see Table 1.
Overall, these initial results revealed that children with more advanced ToM found retaliatory actions in reaction to rule breaking without direct harm, i.e. a conventional violation, to be more unfair than children with less advanced ToM. Thus, these results suggest that ToM, above and beyond age, shapes how children think about responding to rule breaking.

Authors

• Christina Sophia Marlow, North Carolina State University
  Presenting Author

• Peter Strelan, University of Adelaide

• Kelly Lynn S Mulvey, North Carolina State University