No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Children’s developing metaethical judgments
Abstract
Human adults incline toward moral objectivism, but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. Four-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N = 136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge (e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging that it is okay to do X). We assessed children’s metaethical judgment, that is, whether they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could be right. We found that 9-year-olds, but not younger children, were more likely to judge that both parties could be right when a normative ingroup judge disagreed with an antinormative extraterrestrial judge (with different preferences and background) than when the antinormative judge was another ingroup individual. This effect was not found in a comparison case in which parties disagreed about the possibility of different physical laws. These findings suggest that although young children often exhibit moral objectivism, by early school-age they begin to temper their objectivism with culturally relative metaethical judgments.
... This first type of question phrasing ('is it okay. . . ?') is common among research on early moral development to query children as young as 4 years of age about whether they feel a proposed idea is acceptable or permissible (e.g., Echols & Finkbiner, 2013;Schmidt et al., 2017;Smetana et al., 2003;Wainryb et al., 2004). The second question was developed specifically to examine young children's reported tolerant behaviour in a common and salient social context (i.e., play). ...
... ?' to mean different things. Although this phrasing is common in the literature on tolerance (e.g., Echols & Finkbiner, 2013;Schmidt et al., 2017), specific examinations of children's meaning-making of the term 'okay' in research appear to be absent. By examining the phrasing of children's justifications, it appears that most of the children in our sample interpreted the term 'okay' to denote permission or acceptance towards their peers. ...
Societies are becoming increasingly pluralistic, yet acceptance of differing points of view remains an issue. Thus, it is important to understand how young children think about issues related to acceptance of differing views and factors that may be related to sharing greater levels of tolerance. A total of 167 kindergarten students (ages 4–5) were presented with pictures of hypothetical peers and told that each peer held an opposing view from them with respect to a preference (blue, blocks), belief (believing in fairies, believing in superheroes), or moral (lying, tattling). Children were asked if it was okay for this peer to hold a different view, whether they would be willing to play with the peer, and to justify their responses. Measures of children’s theory of mind understanding, language ability, and prosocial behaviour were also collected. Children shared tolerant responses more frequently towards peers who held different preferences and beliefs as compared to different morals. Children who shared intolerant responses frequently rejected the peer’s different view. Willingness to play with a peer was largely based on factors unrelated to tolerance such as the peer’s appearance. Children with higher theory of mind understanding and older children were significantly more likely to report that it was okay for a peer to endorse a different preference or belief, but not a different moral. Implications for children’s reasoning about personal versus moral norms and the promotion of tolerance in the kindergarten years are discussed.
... In East Asian countries, outbound travel often involves Group Independent Tours (GITs) [38,39], and the tour leader plays a critical role in such tours [21,40]. Religious tours, cultural tours, reunion tours for veterans, and tours for professional and interest groups are just several examples of outings that require the services of a tour leader [41,42]. The tour leader accompanies members of the tour during their trip [43,44], and is required by GPTs (Group Package Tour) to deliver core products and services, including guiding and keeping tourists happy. ...
... In East Asian countries, outbound travel often involves Group Independents Tours (GITs) [38], and the tour leader plays a critical role in such tours [21,39]. Religious tours, cultural tours, reunion tours for veterans, and tours for professional and interest groups are just some examples of the kinds of outings that require the services of a tour leader [40,41]. Mainly, the tour leader accompanies members of the tour during their trip [42,43], and is required by Group Package Tours (GPTs) to deliver core products and services, including guiding and keeping tourists safe and entertained. ...
Since 2019, the world has been affected by COVID-19. The tourism industry, in particular, has suffered greatly. For instance, widespread travel restrictions have directly led to unemployment among tourism practitioners, especially tour leaders engaged in leading overseas tour groups. In the current environment, tour companies are limited to training only, and as such have chosen to focus on strengthening three critical areas: the leadership, psychological, and professional skills of their tour operators. This study contributes to the tourism literature by examining the direct and indirect effects of accountability on ownership of organization behavior (OOB) and tour leader personality in the context of the tourism industry, in order to expand the sustainable development of the tourism industry. The definition of OOB is that the psychological influence of the tour leader will affect their behavior, and the psychological consequences of the tour leader will be affected by experience (such as seniority of the team leader or number of tour groups). A structured questionnaire was used to survey tour leaders who hold an international license in Taiwan. The direct mediating influences of competence and having a place (psychological antecedents) on their accountability was confirmed. OOB also partially mediated the direct positive effect of the practice mechanism on their accountability. Our results also confirmed that competence and having a place are important predictors of the practice mechanism, and are better predictors of accountability than OOB. These findings should enhance the organizational design and marketing options available to travel agency businesses, as well as offering guidance to managers attempting to shape and mold their organizational culture and the behaviors of tour leaders associated with the implementation of OOB, in order to improve accountability in the sustainable business model of tourism.
... In Heiphetz and Young (2017), preschoolers were more likely than adults to judge that only one person could be correct in cases of disagreement about norms about hurting or helping others. Schmidt et al. (2017) report similar results: Children aged 4 and 6 were less likely than 9-year-olds to think that two disagreeing parties-an alien and a non-alien-who disagreed about a normative question could both be correct. In addition, as Heiphetz and Young (2017) note, younger children tend in general, across domains, to be objectivist even when older children are not. ...
Normative cognition, as we define it, involves the capacity to make normative judgments, to remember the norms one is committed to, to learn new norms, and to be motivated in various ways (including to be motivated to comply with the norms one endorses and to punish norm violators); it also involves emotions (e.g., admiration or even awe at normative behaviors, outrage or disgust elicited by norm violations, guilt and shame elicited by one’s own norm violations). Some components of normative cognition are specific to the domain of normativity; others may be domain-general traits harnessed for normative purposes: Among the latter, for instance, outrage elicited by norm violation is just a form of anger. The “normative sense hypothesis” proposes that normative cognition, so understood, is shared by typical adult humans across cultures, develops early and reliably, has evolved, and may well be specific to human beings (Machery & Mallon, 2010; Machery, 2018). The normative sense hypothesis contrasts with a further hypothesis that proposes that there is a distinctively moral sense that is universal, develops early and reliably, and is the
product of its own evolutionary trajectory (Joyce, 2006; Tomasello, 2016; Stanford, 2017). In turn, both of these hypotheses contrast with the claim that our capacity to deal with norms (to be motivated by them, comply with them, etc.) is best explained as a product of domain-general cognitive resources, including social learning (Sterelny, 2010; Prinz, 2008). Regardless of its origins, there is no doubt that the normative sense of a typical adult human is complex and highly structured. It involves many normative concepts, values, and more or less abstract norms, and it is connected with motivational structures and emotions. In this chapter, we will be focusing on how much cultural variation there is in the normative sense: Which components of the normative sense are universal and which vary across cultures?
... As we used a spontaneous enforcement measure, this finding could be due to a number of nonmutually exclusive reasons. 1) Older children could have been more measured and controlled in their responses than younger children (53), 2) they could have reached agreement faster than younger children (26), or 3) they may have tolerated conventional transgressions more because they recognized that different rules can coexist (54). Future studies could map norm enforcement across a wider age range (refs. ...
Significance
Humans, as compared with other animals, create and follow conventional norms that determine how we greet each other, dress, or play certain games. Conventional norms are universal in all human societies, but it is an open question whether individuals in all societies also actively enforce conventional norms when others in their group break them. We show that 5- to 8-y-old children from eight highly diverse societies enforced conventional norms (i.e., game rules) when they observed a peer who apparently broke them. Magnitude and style of enforcement varied across societies. Third-party enforcement of conventional norms appears to be a human universal that is expressed in culturally variable ways.
... Metacognition is a comprehensive and relatively stable knowledge about beliefs related to the cognitive system that plays an important role in regulating this cognitive system (13). Ethical metacognition reflects an individual's knowledge and awareness of his or her nature, principles, and ethical processes that are used when conducting ethical evaluations and conducting moral behaviors (14). The results showed that ethical metacognition played an important role in moral decision-making and behaviors (12). ...
... Desde una perspectiva del desarrollo, se puede discutir diversos puntos cruciales para entender la relación que establecen en la infancia con el concepto de justicia. La psicología del desarrollo ha mostrado que los niños desarrollan un cierto sentido de la justicia desde un principio: los bebés de diez meses esperan que los recursos se asignen por igual (Meristo, & Surian, 2013), los niños de 4 y 6 años muestran una marcada aversión a la inequidad (Qiu et al., 2017) y niños después de los 9 años de edad comienzan a moderar su objetivismo con juicios meta-éticos culturalmente relativos sobre la justicia (Schmidt, 2017). Este estudio es pionero en encontrar que las RS, en este caso sobre la justicia, tienen una estructura definida aun en épocas tempranas de la educación formal. ...
Se analizaron las representaciones sociales de la justicia de estudiantes colombianos inscritos desde segundo grado de básica primaria hasta el último año de escolaridad secundaria, su nivel de estructuración y sus similitudes y diferencias en función del grado y el estrato socioeconómico. Desde una perspectiva estructural, se administró una técnica de asociación de palabras a 950 participantes (481 niñas y 469 niños) con el término inductor justicia. Los resultados mostraron que existen diferencias en la estructura de la representación de la justicia en función del estrato socioeconómico. Todos los estudiantes tienen un ideal de justicia que se contrapone con elementos negativos los cuales, en el caso de los colegios ofi-ciales, están ligados a la violencia y la venganza mientras que en los colegios privados están relacionados con la corrupción. La representación de la justicia de los estudiantes de colegios privados es más compleja pues incluye una mayor cantidad de mecanismos para ejercerla, que aquella de los pertenecientes a colegios oficiales. Palabras clave: justicia, desarrollo, representación social, niños y niñas, estrato socioeconómico.
... One person thinks that allowing practice 'x' is morally acceptable; the other person thinks that allowing practice 'x' is morally unacceptable. Following a popular paradigm in moral psychology (Heiphetz & Young 2017;Schmidt, et al. 2017;Beebe 2015), participants were asked whether (a) both parties could be right, (b) at least one of them must be wrong, and were provided (c) a nonresponse option. Selecting (a) was coded as a relativist response, and selecting (b) was coded as an objectivist response. ...
Background:
Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth?
Methods:
To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people's beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics).
Results:
Across various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge.
Conclusions:
We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric, i.e., stronger for opposition than for approval.
... One person thinks that allowing practice 'x' is morally acceptable; the other person thinks that allowing practice 'x' is morally unacceptable. Following a popular paradigm in moral psychology (Heiphetz & Young 2017;Schmidt, et al. 2017;Beebe 2015), participants were asked whether (a) both parties could be right, (b) at least one of them must be wrong, and were provided (c) a nonresponse option. Selecting (a) was coded as a relativist response, and selecting (b) was coded as an objectivist response. ...
Background: Contemporary societies are rife with moral disagreement, resulting in recalcitrant disputes on matters of public policy. In the context of ongoing bioethical controversies, are uncompromising attitudes rooted in beliefs about the nature of moral truth? Methods: To answer this question, we conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, with both a convenience and a nationally representative sample (total N = 1501), investigating the link between people’s beliefs about moral truth (their metaethics) and their beliefs about moral value (their normative ethics). Results: Across various bioethical issues (e.g., medically-assisted death, vaccine hesitancy, surrogacy, mandatory organ conscription, or genetically modified crops), consequentialist attitudes were associated with weaker beliefs in an objective moral truth. This association was not explained by domain-general reflectivity, theism, personality, normative uncertainty, or subjective knowledge. Conclusions: We find a robust link between the way people characterize prescriptive disagreements and their sensibility to consequences. In addition, both societal consensus and personal conviction contribute to objectivist beliefs, but these effects appear to be asymmetric for support versus opposition.
... Those who transmit these norms and conventions often adopt an uncritical and immediate attitude toward them, contributing to transmitting moral customs as if they belonged to an objective area. It is true that recent research has reduced the scope of folk moral objectivism (Sarkissian et al. 2011;Beebe and Sackris 2016;Heiphetz and Young 2017;Schmidt et al. 2017) and that we lack data on folk objectivism in populations other than the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). However, we think that folk moral psychology is closer to an intuitive objectivism than to a reflexive relativism (Pölzler and Wright 2019). ...
We consider the evolutionary scheme of morality proposed by Tomasello, to defend the idea that the ability to orient the learning of offspring using signs of approval/disapproval could be a decisive and necessary step in the evolution of human morality. Those basic forms of intentional evaluative feedback, something we have called assessor teaching, allow parents to transmit their accumulated experience to their children, both about the behaviours that should be learned as well as how they should be copied. The rationale underlying this process is as follows: if a behaviour is approved, then it is good, if it is disapproved, then it is bad. The evaluative guidance on how to behave most probably spread among peers in situations of mutual benefit, such as cooperative child rearing. We argue that our hominin ancestors provided with this capacity for assessor teaching were ideally positioned to develop the two specifically human levels of morality proposed by Tomasello: the morality of fairness and the morality of justice. Assessor teaching could have facilitated the genesis of rudimentary codes of behaviour tied with the need to agree about how to behave to succeed in joint cooperative activities. Moreover, learning through assessor teaching provides a plausible explanation for the origin of the objectivist and prescriptive dimensions of human morality. First, we emphasize that individuals feel that they evaluate the behaviour of others objectively to guide their learning and, second, we underline the imperative intention that any moral manifestation possesses.
You can read it in:
https://rdcu.be/b8gyD
... Such debate also rests on results from many other scientific areas such as psychology and anthropology. Thus, psychologists have analyzed in detail children's development and their learning of how to deal with morality, whereby they discovered that children tend to proceed to engage with morality in an objectivist fashion and then, as they grow up, tend to think and speak in a more relativist way (Schmidt et al. 2017). In addition, there is anthropological investigation of the phenomena of moral pluralism and diversity that are often cited when arguing for the correctness of relativism (Rachels 2001;Wellmann 2001). ...
Metaethical constructivists have proposed many arguments against mind-independence moral realism. In this paper I resume the constructivist critique against realism on the grounds of considerations stemming from moral phenomenology. My claim is that constructivism, in contrast to moral mind-independence theories such as moral realism or quasi-realism, fares better in accounting for the phenomenology of moral practice and discourse. Given the importance of phenomenological investigation for metaethical theorizing as such, my argument shows that there is good reason to prefer constructivism over any kind of theory that endorses the mind-independence of morality.
... They are objective about their known worlds. Later, school-age children come to understand that there may be other sociomoral worlds with their own norms ( Schmidt et al., 2017). ...
Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: first, it has a peremptory, demanding force, with a kind of coercive quality, and second, it is often tied to agreement-like social interactions (e.g., promises) in which breaches prompt normative protest, on the one side, and apologies, excuses, justifications, and guilt, on the other. Drawing on empirical research in comparative and developmental psychology, we provide here a psychological foundation for these unique features by showing that the human sense of obligation is intimately connected developmentally with the formation of a shared agent “we”, which not only directs collaborative efforts but also self-regulates them. Thus, children's sense of obligation is first evident inside, but not outside, of collaborative activities structured by joint agency with a partner, and it is later evident in attitudes toward in-group, but not out-group, members connected by collective agency. When you and I voluntarily place our fate in one another's hands in interdependent collaboration - scaled up to our lives together in an interdependent cultural group - this transforms the instrumental pressure that individuals feel when pursuing individual goals into the pressure that "we" put on me (who needs to preserve my cooperative identity in this “we”) to live up to our shared expectations: a we>me self-regulation. The human sense of obligation may thus be seen as a kind of self-conscious motivation.
... found similarly high degrees of variation in subjects' objectivist versus nonobjectivist interpretation of moral statements. Sarkissian, Park, Tien, Wright, and Knobe's (2011) disagreement-based study has recently been successfully replicated in children(Schmidt, Gonzalez-Cabrera, & Tomasello, 2017) and adults (Gonzalez-Cabrera, personal communication, manuscript in progress) as well. ...
Lay persons may have intuitions about morality’s objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical implications. First, we introduce the methods of empirical research on folk moral objectivism. Second, we provide an overview of the findings that have so far been made. Third, we raise a number of methodological worries that cast doubt upon these findings. And fourth, we discuss ways in which lay persons’ intuitions about moral objectivity may bear on philosophical claims.
... This pattern also occurs with more explicit tests of moral objectivism. Preschool children exhibit higher levels of moral objectivism than 9-year-olds and adults (Schmidt et al. 2017). It has also been observed that the subjectivization of experience occurs at different times for different classes of experience, with 4-to 6year-olds treating properties like fun and icky as more responsedependent than moral properties like good and bad (Nichols & Folds-Bennett 2003). ...
I extend Stanford's proposal in two ways by focusing on a possible mechanism of externalization: disgust. First, I argue that externalization also has value for solving coordination problems where interests of different groups coincide . Second, Stanford's proposal also holds promise for explaining why people “over-comply” with norms through disassociation , or the avoidance of actions that merely appear to violate norms.
... This pattern also occurs with more explicit tests of moral objectivism. Preschool children exhibit higher levels of moral objectivism than 9-year-olds and adults (Schmidt et al. 2017). It has also been observed that the subjectivization of experience occurs at different times for different classes of experience, with 4-to 6year-olds treating properties like fun and icky as more responsedependent than moral properties like good and bad (Nichols & Folds-Bennett 2003). ...
We argue that Stanford's picture of the evolution of externalised norms is plausible mostly because of the idealisations implicit in his defence of it. Once we take into account plausible amounts of normative disagreement, plausible amounts of error and misunderstanding, and the knock-on consequences of shunning, it is plausible that Stanford under-counts the costs of externalisation.
... This pattern also occurs with more explicit tests of moral objectivism. Preschool children exhibit higher levels of moral objectivism than 9-year-olds and adults (Schmidt et al. 2017). It has also been observed that the subjectivization of experience occurs at different times for different classes of experience, with 4-to 6year-olds treating properties like fun and icky as more responsedependent than moral properties like good and bad (Nichols & Folds-Bennett 2003). ...
We argue that although objectivist moral attitudes may facilitate cooperation, they are not necessary for the high levels of cooperation in humans. This is implied by evolutionary models that articulate a mechanism underlying Stanford's account, and is also suggested by the ability of merely conventional social norms to explain extreme human behaviors.
... This sort of distancing effect the authors find in the empirical literature arises at about age 9 (but not much earlier). SeeSchmidt et al. (2017). ...
Bernard Williams proposed his relativism of distance based on the recognition “that others are at varying distances from us”. Recent work in moral psychology and experimental philosophy highlights the prevalence of folk relativism in relation to spatial and temporal distance. However, Williams’ relativism of distance as well as recent empirical findings which seem to support some of Williams’ main ideas on this issue have received scant attention. In this article, we would like to focus on the phenomenon of moral relativism regarding spatiotemporal distance as an entry point to the nature of folk moral relativism and the methodology of meta-ethics. To do so, we first introduce Williams’ relativism of distance. Then we compare Williams’ approach on this matter to recent experimental approaches on folk relativism. On this score the main result is that Williams’ proposal is consistent with several well-established insights on the experimental study of folk relativism. Williams’ relativism of distance is not only empirically plausible, but it is also of relevance for shaping the methodology of an empirically informed meta-ethics. We close this paper by stressing this methodological contribution.
Philosophers have long debated whether morality is objective. But how do lay people think about this matter? A Philosophical Perspective on Folk Moral Objectivism discusses the philosophical aspects of this question in an accessible, integrated and coherent way.
The first part argues that many empirical studies have been unsuccessful in fully or exclusively measuring beliefs about moral objectivity. Still, there are a few lessons that can be drawn from them. Most importantly, lay people are not objectivists. They believe that moral statements only express desires or that their truth is relative to individuals or cultures. The book’s second part considers ways in which these empirical findings may help assess philosophical theories about moral objectivity. Overall, findings about people’s moral objectivity beliefs suggest that morality is not objective. The truth of the matter may even lie beyond the traditional objectivism/non-objectivism dichotomy.
This book develops a unique perspective on a thriving new area of research. It is a valuable resource for upper level undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in moral psychology, theoretical psychology, experimental philosophy, metaethics and philosophy of the mind.
Many philosophers and psychologists have thought that people untutored in philosophy are moral realists. On this view, when people make moral judgments, they interpret their judgments as tracking universal, objective moral facts. But studies of folk metaethics have demonstrated that people have a mix of metaethical attitudes. Sometimes people think of their moral judgments as purely expressive, or as tracking subjective or relative moral facts, or perhaps no facts at all. This paper surveys the evidence for folk metaethical pluralism and argues for an explanation of this mix of folk metaethical attitudes: without philosophical education, these attitudes are typically caused by factors that are insensitive to their truth. Moreover, unless they can be justified by other means, metaethical attitudes with this etiology are, as a result, irrational, and ought not be used as evidence for or against moral realism.
Previous comparisons of language and morality have taken a cognitively internalist (i.e., within-minds) perspective. We take a socially externalist (i.e., between-minds) perspective, viewing both language and morality as forms of social action. During human evolution, social cognitive adaptations for cooperation evolved, including cooperative communication (social acts to mentally coordinate with others for common goals) and social normativity (social acts to regulate cooperative social relationships). As human cooperation scaled up in complexity, cooperative communication and social normativity scaled up as well, leading to the development of culturally elaborated forms of language and morality. Language facilitates all aspects of morality and is even necessary for certain aspects. Humans use language to (1) initiate, (2) preserve, (3) revise, and (4) act on morality in ways such as forming joint commitments, teaching norms, modifying social realities, and engaging in moral reason-giving.
Satisfying one's obligations is an important part of being human. However, people's obligations can often prescribe contradictory behaviors. Moral obligations conflict (loyalty vs. fairness), and so do obligations to different groups (country vs. family when one is called to war). We propose that a broader framework is needed to account for how people balance different social and moral obligations.
Is it particularly human to feel coerced into fulfilling moral obligations, or is it particularly human to enjoy them? I argue for the importance of taking into account how culture promotes prosocial behavior, discussing how Confucian heritage culture enhances the satisfaction of meeting one's obligations.
We offer four counterarguments against Stanford's dismissal of moral externalization as an ancestral condition, based on requirements for ancestral states, mismatch between theoretical and empirical games, passively correlated interactions, and social interfaces that prevent agents’ knowing game payoffs. The fact that children's externalized phenomenology precedes their discovery of subjectivized phenomenology also suggests that externalized phenomenology is an ancestral condition.
Encultured individuals see the behavioral rules of cultural systems of moral norms as objective. In addition to prescriptive regulation of behavior, moral norms provide templates, scripts, and scenarios regulating the expression of feelings and triggered emotions arising from perceptions of norm violation. These allow regulated defensive responses that may arise as moral idea systems co-opt emotionally associated biological survival instincts.
This thesis focuses on the evolution of human social norm psychology. It addresses issues about the cognitive and motivational underpinnings of this particular form of normative thinking as well as their emergence in ontogenetic and evolutionary time. More precisely, this thesis aims to provide a lineage explanation of this capacity, i.e., an explanation that specifies a sequence of changes that takes us from agents with a certain baseline capacity for social cognition to agents with a human norm psychology that enables us to engage in social normative thinking. I want to argue that at least some important aspects of this capacity are closely linked to the psychological phenomenon of shared intentionality. In particular, I want to show how the emergence of our distinctive capacity to follow social norms and make social normative judgments is connected to the lineage explanation of our capacity to form shared intentions, and how such capacity is related to a diverse cluster of prototypical moral judgments. I argue that in explaining the evolution of this form of normative cognition we also require an understanding of the developmental trajectory of this capacity. As a result, we need a comprehensive view of human social norm psychology, one that relies on data about both the cognitive machinery and the development of normative cognition in order to explain its evolution. For this purpose, the thesis is organized as follow. In the first chapter, I make some methodological remarks and provide the general overview and plan for the thesis. In the second chapter, I explain what my explanatory target is and why it matters. On the view I am defending, shared intentional psychology gives rise to a special form of psychology that enables us to engage in social normative thinking. These norms are represented as shared, collective intentional states that create emergent, social level facts. Moral psychology is more diverse, for moral judgments define a quite heterogeneous class of mental states—although some moral judgments may involve the representation and execution of norms, certainly not all them do. I show that although much of our distinctive social norm psychology can be explained within the framework of shared intentionality, moral judgments cannot be unified in the same way. In the third chapter, I provide the baseline of social-cognitive capacities that serve as starting point for my lineage explanation. I argue that hominin social cognition was for a very long period of our evolutionary history essentially a matter of low-level cognitive and motivational processes. On this picture, bottom-up affective processes regulated the social lives of early hominins without requiring any special top-down mechanism of normative thinking such as a capacity for understanding and representing social norms. In the fourth chapter, I argue that human-like social norm psychology evolved as a result of the selective pressures that gave rise to shared intentionality, especially the demands that came from collective hunting. Yet collective hunting was not the whole story of the evolution of shared intentionality, for our capacity to form shared intentional mental states emerged from the interplay between the selective pressures that led to cooperative breeding in humans as well as organized, goal-oriented, collective hunting. Thus, I propose an evo-devo account of shared intentionality and its normative dimension since I argue that explaining the evolution of this particular form of normative thinking crucially depends on information about the developmental trajectory of this capacity. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I focus on how social norms are acquired and how the way we learn them gives rise to a prototypical cluster of moral judgments that has been traditionally associated with the sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy. So this chapter returns to some of themes and arguments of the first chapter by explaining how the distinction between moral judgments and nonmoral judgments can be culturally transmitted and by explaining how moral cognition can be prototype- or exemplar-based.
Here I summarize the main points in my 2016 book, A Natural History of Human Morality. Taking an evolutionary point of view, I characterize human morality as a special form of cooperation. In particular, human morality represents a kind of we > me orientation and valuation that emanates from the logic of social interdependence, both at the level of individual collaboration and at the level of the cultural group. Human morality emanates from psychological processes of shared intentionality evolved to enable individuals to function effectively in ever more cooperative lifeways.
Human social interaction is strongly shaped by other-regarding preferences. These preferences are key for a unique aspect of human sociality – large scale cooperation with genetic strangers – but little is known about their developmental roots. We show here that young children’s other-regarding preferences assume a particular form – inequality aversion – that develops strongly between the ages of 3 and 8. At age 3-4, the overwhelming majority of children behave selfishly, while the vast majority at age 7-8 prefers resource allocations that remove advantageous or disadvantageous inequality. Moreover, inequality aversion is strongly shaped by parochialism, a preference for favouring the members of one’s own social group. These results indicate that human egalitarianism and parochialism have deep developmental roots, and the simultaneous
emergence of altruistic sharing and parochialism during childhood is intriguing in view of recent evolutionary theories which predict that the same evolutionary process jointly drives both human altruism and parochialism.
This study investigated children's evaluations of peer group members who deviated from group norms about equal and unequal allocation of resources. Children, ages 3.5 to 4 years and 5 to 6 years (N = 73), were asked to evaluate a peer group member who deviated from 1 of 2 group allocation norms: (a) equal allocation of resources, or (b) unequal allocation of resources. Most children negatively evaluated deviant group members who espoused an unequal allocation, even when it benefitted the group, and explained their evaluation with reference to fairness. However, participants who liked unequal deviants (who advocated for an unequal allocation of resources) reasoned about group functioning and the benefits that an unequal allocation would have for the group. With age, children displayed social acumen by differentiating their own evaluation of the deviant act from their expectations of the group's favorability toward that deviant member. Findings revealed age-related increases for social acumen about group norms, as well as the use of fairness reasoning regarding resource allocation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Maximum likelihood or restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimates of the
parameters in linear mixed-effects models can be determined using the lmer
function in the lme4 package for R. As for most model-fitting functions in R,
the model is described in an lmer call by a formula, in this case including
both fixed- and random-effects terms. The formula and data together determine a
numerical representation of the model from which the profiled deviance or the
profiled REML criterion can be evaluated as a function of some of the model
parameters. The appropriate criterion is optimized, using one of the
constrained optimization functions in R, to provide the parameter estimates. We
describe the structure of the model, the steps in evaluating the profiled
deviance or REML criterion, and the structure of classes or types that
represents such a model. Sufficient detail is included to allow specialization
of these structures by users who wish to write functions to fit specialized
linear mixed models, such as models incorporating pedigrees or smoothing
splines, that are not easily expressible in the formula language used by lmer.
It has often been suggested that people's ordinary understanding of morality involves a belief in objective moral truths and a rejection of moral relativism. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist moral intuitions when considering individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions considering individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. The authors hypothesize that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions.
Although developmental psychologists traditionally explore morality from a learning and development perspective, some aspects of the human moral sense may be built-in, having evolved to sustain collective action and cooperation as required for successful group living. In this article, I review a recent body of research with infants and toddlers, demonstrating surprisingly sophisticated and flexible moral behavior and evaluation in a preverbal population whose opportunity for moral learning is limited at best. Although this work itself is in its infancy, it supports theoretical claims that human morality is a core aspect of human nature.
Research with adults has demonstrated a "black sheep effect" (BSE) whereby, relative to evaluations of normative group members, ingroup deviants are derogated more than outgroup deviants. The developmental subjective group dynamics (DSGD) model holds that the BSE should develop during middle childhood when children apply wider social norms. Three hundred and thirty-eight children who were between 5 and 12 years old judged a normative (socially desirable) and a deviant (socially undesirable) member from an ingroup or an outgroup school. Results confirmed a developmental increase in the BSE, the first time this has been demonstrated. Children's own evaluations of group members were mediated by their expectations about ingroup peers' evaluations. In line with DSGD and social domain theories, with age, children's explanations of peer evaluations for ingroup deviance focused relatively more on loyalty. Practical and theoretical implications for peer inclusion and exclusion are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
Young children endorse fairness norms related to sharing, but often act in contradiction to those norms when given a chance to share. This phenomenon has rarely been explored in the context of a single study. Using a novel approach, the research presented here offers clear evidence of this discrepancy and goes on to examine possible explanations for its diminution with age. In Study 1, 3-8-year-old children readily stated that they themselves should share equally, asserted that others should as well, and predicted that others had shared equally with them. Nevertheless, children failed to engage in equal sharing until ages 7-8. In Study 2, 7-8-year-olds correctly predicted that they would share equally, and 3-6-year-olds correctly predicted that they would favor themselves, ruling out a failure-of-willpower explanation for younger children's behavior. Similarly, a test of inhibitory control in Study 1 also failed to explain the shift with age toward adherence to the endorsed norm. The data suggest that, although 3-year-olds know the norm of equal sharing, the weight that children attach to this norm increases with age when sharing involves a cost to the self.
In 2 experiments we explored young preschoolers' knowledge of constraints on human action by presenting them with violations of different types of law and asking whether the violations required magic. In Experiment 1, children responded that physical violations required magic more than did social violations. In Experiment 2, violations were presented in pairs and included violations of "mental law." Again, children's "magic" responses were higher for physical than for social violations. Older children also differentiated between mental and social violations. It is concluded that (a) young preschoolers realize that physical constraint is importantly different from social constraint, and (b) children understand that constraints on mental activities are also different from those that operate in the social realm; this understanding develops during the preschool years.
Evidence is accumulating that infants are sensitive to people's false beliefs, whereas children pass the standard false belief test at around 4 years of age. Debate currently centres on the nature of early and late understanding. We defend the view that early sensitivity to false beliefs shown in 'online tasks' (where engagement with ongoing events reflects an expectation of what will happen without a judgement that it will happen) reflects implicit/unconscious social knowledge of lawful regularities. The traditional false belief task requires explicit consideration of the agent's subjective perspective on his reasons for action. This requires an intentional switch of perspectives not possible before 4 years of age as evidenced by correlations between the false belief task and many different perspective-taking tasks.
IntroductionFirst Wave: The Competent InfantSecond Wave: Developmental PatternsDevelopments Within Event CategoriesDevelopments Across Event CategoriesDécalages With Perceptually Identical EventsThird Wave: An Account of Infants' Physical ReasoningPhysical-Reasoning System and Causal FrameworkBasic InformationVariable InformationIdentifying Variables: The Explanation-Based Learning ProcessA Three-System AccountObject-Tracking SystemObject-Representation SystemPhysical-Reasoning SystemDissociation between the OR and PR SystemsRetrieving Object Information from the OR SystemConcluding Remarks: We Have Come a Long Way!References
Social norms have played a key role in the evolution of human cooperation, serving to stabilize prosocial and egalitarian behavior despite the self-serving motives of individuals. Young children’s behavior mostly conforms to social norms, as they follow adult behavioral directives and instructions. But it turns out that even preschool children also actively enforce social norms on others, often using generic normative language to do so. This behavior is not easily explained by individualistic motives; it is more likely a result of children’s growing identification with their cultural group, which leads to prosocial motives for preserving its ways of doing things.
The traditional cognitive developmental perspective on moral acquisition posits that children actively construct moral beliefs by assessing the negative impacts of antisocial behaviors. This account is not easily applied to actions that are considered immoral despite lacking consequences for others' welfare. We studied the moralization of behaviors without tangible impacts, specifically examining the independent and joint roles of feelings and norms in children's acquisition of purity-based morals. Seven-year-olds were shown pictures of anthropomorphic aliens engaged in unfamiliar activities and were asked to judge whether these actions were wrong or OK. Relative to a control condition matched for valence and informational complexity, children made elevated wrongness judgments when they were either disgusted or led to believe that the behaviors were unnatural. However, it was only in a condition that included both disgust induction and information about unnaturalness that children exhibited robust tendencies to judge the actions as wrong. This research therefore demonstrates that feelings and norms work in concert such that purity morals are most readily acquired when both factors are involved. The implications for accounts of moral development are discussed.
We argue that prejudice should be investigated in the context of social-cognitive development and the interplay between morality and group identity. Our new perspective examines how children consider group identity (and group norms) along with their developing moral beliefs about fairness and justice. This is achieved by developing an integrated framework drawing on developmental and social psychological theories of prejudice. This synthesis results in a perspective that provides a more contextualized analysis of prejudice development than that previously offered by developmental theories. We describe research that supports our view that social norms, intergroup contact, and perceived outgroup threat affect the relative weight children place on moral and group-based criteria during the development of prejudice.
© The Author(s) 2010.
This chapter discusses norms in the domains of morality, social convention, and personal jurisdiction from the perspective of psychological development. Many studies have documented that by a young age children think in different ways about each of these domains and that each represents a different developmental pathway. Reasoning about the moral domain, which is a main focus of the chapter, is connected with emotions, and the development of moral judgments stems from individuals’ reciprocal social interactions in direct and everyday experiences. Whereas the domains of norms are distinct, many social situations include considerations from different domains and, therefore, social decisions often involve processes of coordination of weighing those differing and sometimes conflicting considerations. After discussion of processes of coordination, the chapter considers ways that individuals reflect upon the fairness of systems of social organization and coordinate acceptance of norms and opposition to norms through their moral judgments.
Although standardized measures of prejudice reveal high levels of ethnocentric bias in the preschool years, it may reflect in-group favoritism or out-group prejudice. A measure that partially decouples the two attitudes was given to White children between 4 and 7 years of age to examine the reciprocal relation between and the acquisition and correlates of in-group and out-group attitudes. The two attitudes were reciprocally correlated in 1 sample from a racially homogeneous school but not in a 2nd sample from a mixed-race school. In-group favoritism did not appear until 5 years of age but then reached significant levels; it was strongly related to developing social cognitions. Out-group prejudice was weaker, but its targets suffer from comparison with the high favoritism accorded in-group members.
The fair exchange of resources provides a basis for developing morality, yet research has rarely examined the role of group processes that are central to children's world. In this article, we describe a new perspective as well as research demonstrating that group processes play a key role in the fair allocation of resources among children and adolescents. We contend that when children allocate resources, group processes and moral judgments are relevant, a developmental shift occurs in children's ability to coordinate moral and group concerns, and group processes contribute to intergroup bias regarding allocations but also to efforts to consider the status of disadvantaged groups. Our perspective informs efforts to reduce prejudice as well as increase fairness and equality in situations in which group processes are relevant for allocating resources fairly.
Human social life depends heavily on social norms that prescribe and proscribe specific actions. Typically, young children learn social norms from adult instruction. In the work reported here, we showed that this is not the whole story: Three-year-old children are promiscuous normativists. In other words, they spontaneously inferred the presence of social norms even when an adult had done nothing to indicate such a norm in either language or behavior. And children of this age even went so far as to enforce these self-inferred norms when third parties “broke” them. These results suggest that children do not just passively acquire social norms from adult behavior and instruction; rather, they have a natural and proactive tendency to go from “is” to “ought.” That is, children go from observed actions to prescribed actions and do not perceive them simply as guidelines for their own behavior but rather as objective normative rules applying to everyone equally.
Vocal reactions to child transgressions convey information about the nature of those transgressions. The current research investigated children’s ability to make use of such vocal reactions. Study 1 investigated infants’ compliance with a vocal prohibition telling them to stay away from a toy. Compared to younger infants, older infants showed greater compliance with prohibitions elicited by moral (interpersonal harm) transgressions but not with prohibitions elicited by pragmatic (inconvenience) transgressions. Study 2 investigated preschoolers’ use of firm–stern vocalizations (associated with moral transgressions) and positive vocalizations (associated with pragmatic transgressions). Most children guessed that the firm–stern vocalizations were uttered in response to a moral transgression and the positive vocalizations were uttered in response to a pragmatic transgression. These two studies suggest that children use vocal tones, along with other experiences, to guide their compliance with and interpretation of prohibitions.
To investigate whether children rectify social inequalities in a resource allocation task, participants (N=185 African-American and European-American 5-6year-olds and 10-11year-olds) witnessed an inequality of school supplies between peers of different racial backgrounds. Assessments were conducted on how children judged the wrongfulness of the inequality, allocated new resources to racial ingroup and outgroup recipients, evaluated alternative allocation strategies, and reasoned about their decisions. Younger children showed ingroup favorability; their responses differed depending on whether they had witnessed their ingroup or an outgroup at a disadvantage. With age, children increasingly reasoned about the importance of equal access to school supplies and correcting past disparities. Older children judged the resource inequality negatively, allocated more resources to the disadvantaged group, and positively evaluated the actions of others who did the same, regardless of whether they had seen their racial ingroup or an outgroup at a disadvantage. Thus, balancing moral and social group concerns enabled individuals to rectify inequalities and ensure fair access to important resources regardless of racial group membership.
Prior work has established that children and adults distinguish moral norms (e.g., hitting is wrong) from conventional norms (e.g., wearing pajamas to school is wrong). Specifically, moral norms are generally perceived as universal across time and space, similar to objective facts. We examined preschoolers’ and adults’ perceptions of moral beliefs alongside facts and opinions by asking whether only one person could be right in the case of disagreements. We also compared perceptions of widely shared moral beliefs (e.g., whether it is better to pull someone’s hair or share with someone) and controversial moral beliefs (e.g., whether it is better to help someone with a project or make cookies for someone). In Studies 1 and 2, preschoolers and adults were more likely to judge that only one person could be right in the case of widely shared versus controversial moral beliefs, treating the former as more objective or fact-like. Children were also more likely than adults to say that only one person could be right in a moral disagreement. Study 2 additionally revealed that adults were more likely than children to report preferring individuals who shared their controversial moral beliefs. Study 3 replicated these patterns using a different sample of widely shared beliefs (e.g., whether it is okay to mock a poor classmate) and controversial moral beliefs (e.g., whether it is okay to tell small, prosocial lies). While some aspects of moral cognition may depend on abundant social learning and cognitive development, the perception that disagreements about widely shared moral beliefs have only one right answer while disagreements about controversial moral beliefs do not emerges relatively early. We discuss implications for moral learning and social preferences.
This is a book in metaethics that defends a brand of moral realism known as non-naturalism. The book has five Parts. Part I outlines the sort of moral realism that the author wishes to defend, and then offers critiques of expressivism and constructivism. Part II is devoted to issues in metaphysics. It argues that moral realists have adequate replies to worries based on supervenience and the alleged causal inefficacy of moral facts. Part III is devoted to issues of moral motivation. It argues that motivational internalism is false, and that a Humean theory of action is also mistaken. Part IV is devoted to an extended discussion of moral reasons. It argues that externalism about reasons is true, that moral rationalism is true, and that moral realism has an adequate account of moral disagreement. Part V is devoted to moral epistemology. It argues for the self-evidence of pro tanto moral principles, and for a version of reliabilism about ethical knowledge.
Human cultural groups value conformity to arbitrary norms (e.g., rituals, games) which are the
result of collective “agreement”. Ninety-six 3-year-olds had the opportunity to agree upon
arbitrary norms with puppets. Results revealed that children normatively enforced these novel
norms only on a deviator who had actually entered into the agreement (not on dissenting or
ignorant individuals). Interestingly, any dissent during the norm-setting process (even if a
majority of 90% preferred one course of action) prevented children from seeing a norm as
established for anyone at all. These findings suggest that even young children understand
something of the role of agreement in establishing mutually binding social norms, but that their
notion of norm formation may be confined to conditions of unanimity.
Morality is a central aspect of social life and has been at the core of psychological theories for more than a century. The scientific study of morality poses enduring questions about how individual psychological needs for autonomy and attachment to groups and society can be met while also ensuring the integrity, dignity, and fair treatment of others. Drawing on philosophy, biology, anthropology, and sociology, developmental scientists have addressed these questions by studying the origins and acquisition of morality as well as the sources and nature of change. We provide a brief review of the theories that provided the foundation for research over the past half-century and then reflect on the controversies and misconceptions that still exist. We review current psychological research on the developmental roots of morality, morality and mental state knowledge, and moral judgments and reasoning. We also examine the various contexts, ranging from the family and peer groups to society, in which moral development occurs. The rich and growing literature on children’s moral judgments has demonstrated that children’s concepts of harm, resource allocation, fair and equal treatment of others, social inequities, and rights each develop from a very focused and narrow form in early childhood to their application to broader situational and cultural contexts. As they grow older, children become able to weigh and coordinate competing concerns in different contexts as they apply their moral judgments and emotions to social situations. We conclude with implications and directions for research. Throughout the chapter, we demonstrate how the study of morality has shed light on fundamental topics in developmental science, contributed novel methods, and discovered new knowledge about child development.
I begin by describing my relation with Nicholas Sturgeon and his objections to things I have said about moral explanations. Then I turn to issues about moral relativism. One of these is whether a plausible version of moral relativism can be formulated as a claim about the logical form of certain moral judgments. I (now) agree that is not a good way to think of moral relativism. Instead, I think of moral relativism as a version of moral realism. I compare moral relativism with the relativity of motion and with the relativity of language. Moralities are real in a way that is similar to the way that languages are real. Next I discuss resemblances between nonhuman animal behavior and human behavior having to do with language or communication and with moral or proto-moral behavior. However, I am more interested in aspects of language and morality that are not found in nonhuman animals, aspects that appear to depend on a kind of recursive structure in human language and morality but not in animals. This leads me to argue that aspects of moral theory might benefit from a comparison with certain aspects of linguistic theory. Another comparison is between moralities and legal systems: I speculate that the content of legal and moral systems is influenced by legal and moral bargaining.
Considers the following questions: What accounts for the existence of basic moral disagreements? Why do most people think it is worse to injure someone than to fail to save them from injury? Where does the right of self‐defence come from? Why do many people think it is morally permissible to treat animals in ways we would not treat people? Why are some people moral relativists and others not? What is it to value something and what is it to value something intrinsically? How are a person's values (noun) related to what the person values (verb)? How much of morality can or should be explained in terms of human flourishing or the possession of virtuous character traits? For that matter, are there character traits of the sort we normally suppose there are? How do people come to be moral? Is morality something one learns or does it arise in everyone naturally without instruction?
A common type of transgression in early childhood involves creating inconvenience, for instance by spilling, playing with breakable objects, or otherwise interfering with others’ activities. Despite the prevalence of such pragmatic transgressions, little is known about children's conceptions of norms prohibiting these acts. The present study examined whether 3–5-year-olds (N = 58) see pragmatic norms as distinct from first-order moral (welfare and rights of others), prudential (welfare of agent), and social conventional norms. Children judged all four types of transgressions to be wrong. Justifications for pragmatic transgressions focused on inconvenience to the transgressor, inconvenience to others, or material disorder. Children rated pragmatic and conventional transgressions as less serious than moral and prudential transgressions. Latent Class Analysis provided further support for the conclusion that preschoolers see pragmatic norms as a category distinct from first-order moral, prudential, and social conventional norms.
For adults, loyalty to the group is highly valued, yet little is known about how children evaluate loyalty. We investigated children's attitudes about loyalty in a third-party context. In the first experiment, 4- and 5-year-olds watched a video of two groups competing. Two members of the losing group then spoke. The disloyal individual said she wanted to win and therefore would join the other group. The loyal individual said she also wanted to win but would stay with her group. Children were then asked five forced-choice questions about these two individuals' niceness, trustworthiness, morality, and deservingness of a reward. The 5-year-olds preferred the loyal person across all questions; results for the 4-year-olds were considerably weaker but in the same direction. The second experiment investigated the direction of the effect in 5-year-olds. In this experiment, children answered questions about either a loyal individual, a disloyal individual, or a neutral individual. Children rated both the loyal and neutral individuals more positively than the disloyal individual across a number of measures. Thus, whereas disloyal behavior is evaluated unfavorably by children, loyal behavior is the expected norm. These results suggest that, at least from 5years of age, children understand that belonging to a group entails certain commitments. This marks an important step in their own ability to negotiate belonging and become trustworthy and reliable members of their social groups.
Observational studies suggest that children as young as 2 years can evaluate some of the arguments people offer them. However, experimental studies of sensitivity to different arguments have not yet targeted children younger than 5 years. The current study aimed at bridging this gap by testing the ability of preschoolers (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) to weight arguments. To do so, it focused on a common type of fallacy—circularity—to which 5-year-olds are sensitive. The current experiment asked children—and, as a group control, adults—to choose between the contradictory opinions of two speakers. In the first task, participants of all age groups favored an opinion supported by a strong argument over an opinion supported by a circular argument. In the second task, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds or adults, favored the opinion supported by a circular argument over an unsupported opinion. We suggest that the results of these tasks in 3- to 5-year-olds are best interpreted as resulting from the combination of two mechanisms: (a) basic skills of argument evaluations that process the content of arguments, allowing children as young as 3 years to favor non-circular arguments over circular arguments, and (b) a heuristic that leads older children (4- and 5-year-olds) to give some weight to circular arguments, possibly by interpreting these arguments as a cue to speaker dominance.
Statistical analysis is a useful skill for linguists and psycholinguists, allowing them to understand the quantitative structure of their data. This textbook provides a straightforward introduction to the statistical analysis of language. Designed for linguists with a non-mathematical background, it clearly introduces the basic principles and methods of statistical analysis, using ’R’, the leading computational statistics programme. The reader is guided step-by-step through a range of real data sets, allowing them to analyse acoustic data, construct grammatical trees for a variety of languages, quantify register variation in corpus linguistics, and measure experimental data using state-of-the-art models. The visualization of data plays a key role, both in the initial stages of data exploration and later on when the reader is encouraged to criticize various models. Containing over 40 exercises with model answers, this book will be welcomed by all linguists wishing to learn more about working with and presenting quantitative data.
Children's lives are governed by social norms. Since Piaget, however, it has been assumed that they understand very little about how norms work. Recent studies in which children enforce social norms indicate a richer understanding, but the children are still relating to pre-existing adult norms. In the current study, triads of 5-year-old children worked on an instrumental task without adult guidance or instruction. The children spontaneously created social norms for how the game “should” be played, and they transmitted these with special force (using more generic and objective language) to novices. The fact that they created their own norms suggests that young children understand, at least to some degree, the conventional nature and special force of social norms in binding all who would participate.
Children's ability to distinguish among those regularities in the environment governed by social convention and those governed by physical law was investigated in this study. 75 children from the first, third, and fifth grades were each asked a series of questions pertaining to 6 topic areas. 4 of these topics dealt with conventionality, one with moral rules, and another with physical laws. In each topic area such issues as the child's understanding of the convention, rule, or law and the child's belief in the universality of the convention, rule, or law were addressed by similar questions. 4 conclusions were drawn from the results: (a) Children's ability to distinguish between social convention and physical law increases with age. (b) In learning to make this distinction, many children pass through an intermediate stage where they believe, incorrectly, that both physical laws and social conventions can be changed. (c) Children's understanding of conventionality develops as an organized whole. (d) Some conventions are more difficult to change than others. Children are more reluctant to change moral rules than conventions.
This title presents an insight into moral skepticism of the 20th century. The author argues that our every-day moral codes are an 'error theory' based on the presumption of moral facts which, he persuasively argues, don't exist. His refutation of such facts is based on their metaphysical 'queerness' and the observation of cultural relativity.
First-, third-, and fifth-grade students (7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds) saw matters involving intellectual conventions and personal preference as more variable across time and space than matters involving logic and physical laws. Furthermore, intellectual conventions were seen as legitimately changeable by social consensus and (less clearly) school authorities, but not on the basis of personal desire. On matters of logic and physical law, however, the positions individuals can legitimately espouse were not seen as legitimately changeable by school authorities or on the basis of social consensus or personal desire. It was seen as legitimate for teachers to teach students standard "correct" answers on matters of intellectual convention, logic, and fact, but not for matters of personal preference. Only in the last case was it seen as legitimate for teachers to allow free choice and diverse positions. Judgments about the changeability of conventions were distinguishable from judgments about the legitimacy of such changes. Reliable individual differences in these judgments were found. Age differences, however, were not strong.
The beliefs people hold about the social and physical world are central to self-definition and social interaction. The current research analyzes reasoning about three kinds of beliefs: those that concern matters of fact (e.g., dinosaurs are extinct), preference (e.g., green is the prettiest color), and ideology (e.g., there is only one God). The domain of ideology is of unique interest because it is hypothesized to contain elements of both facts and preferences. If adults' distinct reasoning about ideological beliefs is the result of prolonged experience with the physical and social world, children and adults should reveal distinct patterns of differentiating kinds of beliefs, and this difference should be particularly pronounced with respect to ideological beliefs. On the other hand, if adults' reasoning about beliefs is a basic component of social cognition, children and adults should demonstrate similar belief representations and patterns of belief differentiation. Two experiments demonstrate that 5-10 year old children and adults similarly judged religious beliefs to be intermediate between factual beliefs (where two disagreeing people cannot both be right) and preferences (where they can). From the age of 5 years and continuing into adulthood, individuals distinguished ideological beliefs from other types of mental states and demonstrated limited tolerance for belief-based disagreements.
Social categorization is an early-developing feature of human social cognition, yet the role that social categories play in children's understanding of and predictions about human behavior has been unclear. In the studies reported here, we tested whether a foundational functional role of social categories is to mark people as intrinsically obligated to one another (e.g., obligated to protect rather than harm). In three studies, children (aged 3-9, N = 124) viewed only within-category harm as violating intrinsic obligations; in contrast, they viewed between-category harm as violating extrinsic obligations defined by explicit rules. These data indicate that children view social categories as marking patterns of intrinsic interpersonal obligations, suggesting that a key function of social categories is to support inferences about how people will relate to members of their own and other groups.
Children and adolescents evaluated group inclusion and exclusion in the context of generic and group-specific norms involving morality and social conventions. Participants (N = 381), aged 9.5 and 13.5 years, judged an in-group member's decision to deviate from the norms of the group, whom to include, and whether their personal preference was the same as what they expected a group should do. Deviating from in-group moral norms about unequal allocation of resources was viewed more positively than deviating from conventional norms about nontraditional dress codes. With age, participants gave priority to group-specific norms and differentiated what the group should do from their own preference about the group's decision, revealing a developmental picture about children's complex understanding of group dynamics and group norms.
Abstract— Humans are cultural animals, enveloped in the arbitrary norms, practices, and symbols—or conventions—unique to a particular community of people. The adaptive value for children of recognizing such cultural conventions is indisputable, raising critical questions concerning how they do so. This article first reviews the extant evidence indicating that from early in life, young children appreciate that certain socially available knowledge is known only by members of their cultural community. It then discusses 2 possible accounts of the development of such an assumption and outlines certain challenges facing those accounts. The article concludes by suggesting some directions for future work that are grounded in a sociocognitive approach to cultural acquisition.
The notion of conformity to law is an explanatory principle that appears in commonsense theories of both intentional and natural phenomena. Yet, adults distinguish sharply between conformity mediated by intentions and conformity mediated by physical interactions. To what extent do young children also see these processes as different? Three- to 5-year-old children gave different justifications for why actors “can't” violate physical laws or social rules. Consequences and permission/obligation were said to produce conformity to social rules. Justifications for laws involved reference to physical limitations or explicit statements of impossibility. Two follow-up studies assessed understanding of the role of mental states in producing conformity. Older preschool-aged children (but not 3-year-olds) appreciated that conformity to social rules depended on the knowledge and intentions of actors, whereas conformity to physical laws was independent of mental state. These studies suggest that, by age 5, children recognize different sorts of constraint or modality expressed in laws.
To become cooperative members of their cultural groups, developing children must follow their group's social norms. But young children are not just blind norm followers, they are also active norm enforcers, for example, protesting and correcting when someone plays a conventional game the "wrong" way. In two studies, we asked whether young children enforce social norms on all people equally, or only on ingroup members who presumably know and respect the norm. We looked at both moral norms involving harm and conventional game norms involving rule violations. Three-year-old children actively protested violation of moral norms equally for ingroup and outgroup individuals, but they enforced conventional game norms for ingroup members only. Despite their ingroup favoritism, young children nevertheless hold ingroup members to standards whose violation they tolerate from outsiders.
Research on theory of mind increasingly encompasses apparently contradictory findings. In particular, in initial studies, older preschoolers consistently passed false-belief tasks — a so-called “definitive” test of mental-state understanding — whereas younger children systematically erred. More recent studies, however, have found evidence of false-belief understanding in 3-year-olds or have demonstrated conditions that improve children's performance. A meta-analysis was conducted (N= 178 separate studies) to address the empirical inconsistencies and theoretical controversies. When organized into a systematic set of factors that vary across studies, false-belief results cluster systematically with the exception of only a few outliers. A combined model that included age, country of origin, and four task factors (e.g., whether the task objects were transformed in order to deceive the protagonist or not) yielded a multiple R of .74 and an R2 of .55; thus, the model accounts for 55% of the variance in false-belief performance. Moreover, false-belief performance showed a consistent developmental pattern, even across various countries and various task manipulations: preschoolers went from below-chance performance to above-chance performance. The findings are inconsistent with early competence proposals that claim that developmental changes are due to tasks artifacts, and thus disappear in simpler, revised false-belief tasks; and are, instead, consistent with theoretical accounts that propose that understanding of belief, and, relatedly, understanding of mind, exhibit genuine conceptual change in the preschool years.
Children aged 6-7 years and 10-11 years evaluated an in-group or out-group summer school and judged in-group or out-group members whose attitudes towards the summer schools were either normative or anti-normative. According to a subjective group dynamics model of intergroup processes, intergroup differentiation and intragroup differentiation co-occur to bolster the validity of in-group norms. The hypothesis that this process develops later than simple in-group bias was confirmed. All children expressed global in-group bias, but differential reactions to in-group and outgroup deviants were stronger among older children. Moreover, the increasing relationship, with age, between in-group bias and evaluative preferences for in-group and out-group members that provide relative support to in-group norms, is mediated by the degree of perceptual differentiation among group members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Copyright of British Journal of Developmental Psychology is the property of British Psychological Society and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts)