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Development of beliefs about censorship
Abstract
Across four studies (total N = 431), we examined 5- to 10-year-old children's choices to censor depictions of harm. In all studies, children learned about (fictional) movies that depicted harmful behaviors and decided whether specific audiences should be allowed to watch those movies. In Study 1, children often censored depictions of harms and did so similarly when considering both themselves and another hypothetical child as the viewer. At the same time, children did not censor indiscriminately: Children censored depictions of intentional harms more than accidental harms and, in Study 2, children (and adults; N = 101) censored harms (especially intentional ones) more from younger versus older audiences. In Studies 3 and 4, we more directly tested children's motivations for censoring harms, examining dual potential motivations of 1) preventing viewers from feeling sad; and 2) preventing viewers from being inspired to engage in harmful behaviors. We found that children who were motivated to avoid inspiring harmful behaviors were especially likely to censor depictions of harmful intentions. Together, our results indicate that children make sophisticated decisions regarding censorship and underscore an early emerging motivation to disrupt cascades of harmful behavior. These findings hold implications for children's thinking about the psychological and behavioral consequences of harm and for children's thinking about the potential effects of media on themselves and others.
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Research in political psychology largely ignores early childhood. This is likely due to the assumption that young children lack the cognitive capacity and social understanding needed for political thought. Challenging this assumption, we argue that research with young children is both possible and important for political psychologists. We focus on the topic of political ideology to demonstrate our argument. We review recent evidence revealing that social cognition in early childhood—and even infancy—is already oriented toward group living in ways that set the foundation of political thought. Young children notice key dimensions of group living (e.g., group boundaries, hierarchies, norms) and use them to guide their reasoning and behavior. Beyond these basic proto-political sensitivities, young children also display proto-political attitudes: valenced and/or prescriptive cognitions about dimensions of group living that have political significance (e.g., disliking nonconforming group members, believing that hierarchy between groups is wrong). Even more reminiscent of mainstream political psychology, young children’s proto-political sensitivities and attitudes exhibit systematic individual differences that can roughly be mapped onto three ideological orientations common among adults: authoritarianism, social dominance, and hawkish ideology. We discuss ways in which research with young children is critical for a complete understanding of adult political psychology.
Third-party punishment of antisocial others is unique to humans and seems to be universal across cultures. However, its emergence in ontogeny remains unknown. We developed a participatory cognitive paradigm using gaze-contingency techniques, in which infants can use their gaze to affect agents displayed on a monitor. In this paradigm, fixation on an agent triggers the event of a stone crushing the agent. Throughout five experiments (total N = 120), we show that eight-month-old infants punished antisocial others. Specifically, infants increased their selective looks at the aggressor after watching aggressive interactions. Additionally, three control experiments excluded alternative interpretations of their selective gaze, suggesting that punishment-related decision-making influenced looking behaviour. These findings indicate that a disposition for third-party punishment of antisocial others emerges in early infancy and emphasize the importance of third-party punishment for human cooperation. This behavioural tendency may be a human trait acquired over the course of evolution.
Strategic collaboration according to the law of comparative advantage involves dividing tasks based on the relative capabilities of group members. Three experiments (N = 405, primarily White and Asian, 45% female, collected 2016–2019 in Canada) examined how this strategy develops in children when dividing cognitive labor. Children divided questions about numbers between two partners. By 7 years, children allocated difficult questions to the skilled partner (Experiment 1, d = 1.42; Experiment 2, d = 0.87). However, younger children demonstrated a self‐serving bias, choosing the easiest questions for themselves. Only when engaging in a third‐party collaborative task did 5‐year‐olds assign harder questions to the more skilled individual (Experiment 3, d = 0.55). These findings demonstrate early understanding of strategic collaboration subject to a self‐serving bias.
An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms. In Experiment 1, children compared simple harms (intended and completed) and then scenarios in which the perpetrator's intention did not match the outcome (intended emotional harm, but caused physical harm, or vice-versa). Assessments of the severity of emotional (vs. physical) harm increased with age and depended on the perpetrator's intentions. In Experiment 2, children saw emotional and physical harms that were: Simple (intended and completed); Incomplete (intended, but not completed); or Accidental (not intended, but completed). Children evaluated physical and emotional harms in isolation and then compared the two. Judgments of the relative severity of emotional harm increased with age, but only when intentions and outcomes were both present. This reflected an increase with age in children's perceptions that emotional harm was hurtful, whereas perceptions of physical harm were relatively stable across development. With age, children also increasingly associated emotional harms with longer-term impacts (being remembered and reoccurring). These findings suggest reasoning about the severity, underlying intentions, and duration of emotional harm shifts with age. The results hold implications for moral development, law and psychology, and emotional-harm-related interventions including those addressing bullying. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Globally, women are underrepresented in politics. We propose developmental psychology offers an important, yet underused, theoretical lens for understanding and counteracting the gender gap in political leadership. In making this proposal, we harness insight from research on women’s underrepresentation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), where developmental psychology has revealed that cultural beliefs and attitudes about STEM are transmitted early in life and begin undermining girls’ interest and confidence in STEM long before adulthood. Leveraging developmental research from STEM as inspiration, we identify five areas of inquiry that are critical to a developmentally informed perspective on the origins of the gender gap in politics. Although studying children to understand political inequities among adults may be playing the “long game,” we argue this will be a necessary step to advance gender equity in political leadership.
Adults punish moral transgressions to satisfy both retributive motives (such as wanting antisocial others to receive their ‘just deserts’) and consequentialist motives (such as teaching transgressors that their behaviour is inappropriate). Here, we investigated whether retributive and consequentialist motives for punishment are present in children approximately between the ages of five and seven. In two preregistered studies (N = 251), children were given the opportunity to punish a transgressor at a cost to themselves. Punishment either exclusively satisfied retributive motives by only inflicting harm on the transgressor, or additionally satisfied consequentialist motives by teaching the transgressor a lesson. We found that children punished when doing so satisfied only retributive motives, and punished considerably more when doing so also satisfied consequentialist motives. Together, these findings provide evidence for the presence of both retributive and consequentialist motives in young children.
Coordinating competing interests can be difficult. Because law regulates human behavior, it is a candidate mechanism for creating coordination in the face of societal disagreement. We argue that findings from moral psychology are necessary to understand why law can effectively resolve co-occurring conflicts related to punishment and group membership. First, we discuss heterogeneity in punitive thought, focusing on punishment within the United States legal system. Though the law exerts a weak influence on punitive ideologies before punishment occurs, we argue that it effectively coordinates perceptions of individuals who have already been punished. Next, we discuss intergroup conflict, which often co-occurs with disagreements related to punishment and represents a related domain where coordination can be difficult to achieve. Here, we underscore how insights from moral psychology can promote equality via the law. These examples demonstrate how contributions from moral psychology are necessary to understand the connection between social cognition and law.
When do people find it acceptable to sacrifice one life to save many? Cross-cultural studies suggested a complex pattern of universals and variations in the way people approach this question, but data were often based on small samples from a small number of countries outside of the Western world. Here we analyze responses to three sacrificial dilemmas by 70,000 participants in 10 languages and 42 countries. In every country, the three dilemmas displayed the same qualitative ordering of sacrifice acceptability, suggesting that this ordering is best explained by basic cognitive processes, rather than cultural norms. The quantitative acceptability of each sacrifice, though, showed substantial country-level variations. We show that low relational mobility (where people are more cautious about not alienating their current social partners) is strongly associated with the rejection of sacrifices for the greater good (especially for Eastern countries), which may be explained by the signaling value of this rejection. We make our dataset fully available as a public resource for researchers studying universals and variations in human morality: all the data and code used in this article can be downloaded at https://bit.ly/2Y7Brr9.
Humans' evolutionary success has depended in part on their willingness to punish, at personal cost, bad actors who have not harmed them directly-a behavior known as costly third-party punishment. The present studies examined the psychological processes underlying this behavior from a developmental perspective, using a novel, naturalistic method. In these studies (ages 3-6, total N = 225), participants of all ages enacted costly punishment, and rates of punishment increased with age. In addition, younger children (ages 3-4), when in a position of authority, were more likely to punish members of their own group, whereas older children (ages 5-6) showed no group- or authority-based differences. These findings demonstrate the developmental emergence of costly punishment, and show how a sense of authority can foster the kind of group-regulatory behavior that costly punishment may have evolved to serve. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
The number of online experiments conducted with subjects recruited via online platforms has grown considerably in the recent past. While one commercial crowdworking platform - Amazon's Mechanical Turk - basically has established and since dominated this field, new alternatives offer services explicitly targeted at researchers. In this article, we present www.prolific.ac and lay out its suitability for recruiting subjects for social and economic science experiments. After briefly discussing key advantages and challenges of online experiments relative to lab experiments, we trace the platform's historical development, present its features, and contrast them with requirements for different types of social and economic experiments.
Adolescents' evaluations of discriminatory race-based humor and their expectations about peer responses to discrimination were investigated in 8th- (Mage = 13.80) and 10th-grade (Mage = 16.11) primarily European-American participants (N = 256). Older adolescents judged race-based humor as more acceptable than did younger adolescents and were less likely to expect peer intervention. Participants who rejected discrimination were more likely to reference welfare/rights and prejudice and to anticipate that peers would intervene. Showing awareness of group processes, adolescents who rejected race-based humor believed that peers who intervened would be more likely to be excluded. They also disapproved of exclusion more than did participants who supported race-based humor. Results expose the complexity of situations involving subtle discrimination. Implications for bullying interventions are discussed.
Although children's initial perceptions and judgments about sociomoral situations are being actively explored, little is known about what children remember about them. In four experiments testing over 400 children, we investigated children's memories for small acts of giving and taking. When asked to recall their own giving and taking, children were relatively accurate following a number of delays. In contrast, when asked to recall a child's giving or taking, children exaggerated the child's taking after a 1-day or 1-week delay. Notably, this pattern of misremembering occurred only when children recalled the actions of a child but not an adult. We consider the idea that children spontaneously engage in social comparison, which colors their memories of the social world. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
The current study investigated 4- to 8-year-olds' (N = 81) understanding of embarrassment and their ability to integrate temporal and mental state information to predict and explain emotions. Participants heard stories describing characters commit trivial social transgressions, and then the next day, characters found themselves in the same situation that led to the previous transgression. For some story endings, participants were asked to predict and explain how the character felt, and for others, participants were told the character started to feel embarrassed and they were asked to explain why. Participants' responses were coded and analysed using nonparametric statistical tests. Kruskal-Wallis analyses revealed significant developments occur between 6 and 8 years in children's understanding of embarrassment and their ability to explain individual's emotion as caused by anticipating the reoccurrence of a previous embarrassing event. Younger children demonstrated a basic knowledge of embarrassment but failed to demonstrate more advanced understanding of the emotion. Findings from the current study indicate children reach a more mature understanding of embarrassment and the implications of committing social transgressions between 7 and 8 years. Finally, the current study contributes to the literature on children's ability to infer mental states and temporally connect experiences.
© 2015 The British Psychological Society.
ABSTRACT The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where theory of mind and moral judgment meet. Preschool children's judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side effect is brought about “on purpose” when the side effect itself is morally bad, but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of whether something was done on purpose (as opposed to judgments of purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentionality are usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative—even in preschoolers—challenges current understanding. Young children's judgments regarding foreseen side effects depend on whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the theory-of-mind concept “not care that P,” children show the side-effect effect.
In the research reported here, we examined whether individual differences in authoritarianism have expressions in early childhood. We expected that young children would be more responsive to cues of deviance and status to the extent that their parents endorsed authoritarian values. Using a sample of 43 preschoolers and their parents, we found support for both expectations. Children of parents high in authoritarianism trusted adults who adhered to convention (vs. adults who did not) more than did children of parents low in authoritarianism. Furthermore, compared with children of parents low in authoritarianism, children of parents high in authoritarianism gave greater weight to a status-based "adult = reliable" heuristic in trusting an ambiguously conventional adult. Findings were consistent using two different measures of parents' authoritarian values. These findings demonstrate that children's trust-related behaviors vary reliably with their parents' orientations toward authority and convention, and suggest that individual differences in authoritarianism express themselves well before early adulthood.
Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. The effects appear larger for milder than for more severe forms of aggression, but the effects on severe forms of violence are also substantial ( r = .13 to .32) when compared with effects of other violence risk factors or medical effects deemed important by the medical community (e.g., effect of aspirin on heart attacks). The research base is large; diverse in methods, samples, and media genres; and consistent in overall findings. The evidence is clearest within the most extensively researched domain, television and film violence. The growing body of video-game research yields essentially the same conclusions.
Short-term exposure increases the likelihood of physically and verbally aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts, and aggressive emotions. Recent large-scale longitudinal studies provide converging evidence linking frequent exposure to violent media in childhood with aggression later in life, including physical assaults and spouse abuse. Because extremely violent criminal behaviors (e.g., forcible rape, aggravated assault, homicide) are rare, new longitudinal studies with larger samples are needed to estimate accurately how much habitual childhood exposure to media violence increases the risk for extreme violence.
Well-supported theory delineates why and when exposure to media violence increases aggression and violence. Media violence produces short-term increases by priming existing aggressive scripts and cognitions, increasing physiological arousal, and triggering an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors. Media violence produces long-term effects via several types of learning processes leading to the acquisition of lasting (and automatically accessible) aggressive scripts, interpretational schemas, and aggression-supporting beliefs about social behavior, and by reducing individuals' normal negative emotional responses to violence (i.e., desensitization).
Certain characteristics of viewers (e.g., identification with aggressive characters), social environments (e.g., parental influences), and media content (e.g., attractiveness of the perpetrator) can influence the degree to which media violence affects aggression, but there are some inconsistencies in research results. This research also suggests some avenues for preventive intervention (e.g., parental supervision, interpretation, and control of children's media use). However, extant research on moderators suggests that no one is wholly immune to the effects of media violence.
Recent surveys reveal an extensive presence of violence in modern media. Furthermore, many children and youth spend an inordinate amount of time consuming violent media. Although it is clear that reducing exposure to media violence will reduce aggression and violence, it is less clear what sorts of interventions will produce a reduction in exposure. The sparse research literature suggests that counterattitudinal and parental-mediation interventions are likely to yield beneficial effects, but that media literacy interventions by themselves are unsuccessful.
Though the scientific debate over whether media violence increases aggression and violence is essentially over, several critical tasks remain. Additional laboratory and field studies are needed for a better understanding of underlying psychological processes, which eventually should lead to more effective interventions. Large-scale longitudinal studies would help specify the magnitude of media-violence effects on the most severe types of violence. Meeting the larger societal challenge of providing children and youth with a much healthier media diet may prove to be more difficult and costly, especially if the scientific, news, public policy, and entertainment communities fail to educate the general public about the real risks of media-violence exposure to children and youth.
Recent calls for censorship of rap music have demonstrated the need to test the perceptual and especially the behavioral components of Davison's third-person effect hypothesis. The hypothesis states that people perceive media content to have a greater impact on others than on themselves (perceptual component), and that these perceptions lead people to take actions, such as censorship, to prevent the impact (behavioral component). Results of a survey of college students (N = 202) using rap lyrics as the context revealed strong support for both components of the hypothesis. Limited support was found for the social distance corollary of the perceptual component, while the knowledge corollary of the perceptual component was not supported. A new target corollary to the perceptual component was proposed; it predicts that those groups seen as likely targets of a communication will produce larger third-person perceptions than will generalized others.
This paper explores the social and spatial dimensions of the Internet among Latin American countries. First, it summarizes the infrastructure that makes the region's Internet possible. Second, it maps the rapidly changing distribution of Latin American Internet users between 2000 and 2008, including their collective representations on the Web, and their explosive rates of growth. Third, it explores the economic and social variables that underpin discrepancies in Internet access, including GDP per capita, literacy rates, and telephone penetration rates. Fourth, it turns to the emergence of broadband in selected countries. Fifth, it focuses on residential uses. Sixth, it examines Latin American governments' attempts to censor the Internet, which varies markedly. Finally, it summarizes the roles of electronic commerce and governance in this part of the world.
Resumen:
En este estudio se analiza las dimensiones socio-espaciales del Internet en los países latinoamericanos. Primero, ofrece una descripción de la infraestructura a través de la cual se mantiene el Internet en la región. Segundo, hace un mapeo de la rápida y cambiante distribución de los usuarios del Internet entre los años 2000 y 2008, incluyendo sus representaciones colectivas, y su explosiva tasa de crecimiento. Tercero, explora las variables socio-económicas que sostienen las discrepancias en el acceso al Internet, incluyendo PBD per-capita, tasas de alfabetismo y tasas de cobertura telefónica. Cuarto, considera la aparición de la banda ancha en países seleccionados. Quinto, enfoca el análisis en usos residenciales. Sexto, examina los intentos de censura del Internet por parte de los gobiernos latinoamericanos en sus distintos resultados. Finalmente, hace un resumen de los roles del Internet en el comercio y la gobernabilidad en este parte del mundo.
We assessed 5- to 11-year-olds' (N = 76) judgments of straightforward moral transgressions (prototypical harm) as well as their evaluations of complex, hypothetical scenarios in which an actor transgresses in order to prevent injury (necessary harm). The nature of the actor's transgression (psychological or physical harm) varied across participants. Moral judgments and justifications, knowledge of the actor's psychological experience, and their associations were examined. At all ages, children negatively evaluated prototypical harm; judgments of necessary harm became increasingly more forgiving with age as justifications pertaining to the actor's harm decreased. References to the actor's positive actions and children's tendency to coordinate conflicting concerns increased with age, but only when evaluating psychological harm. Across conditions, older children viewed transgressors as holding increasingly more positive attitudes toward their own actions, and this was uniquely associated with more forgiving moral judgments and justifications of necessary but not prototypical harm. Findings are discussed in relation to the emergence of more flexible and nuanced moral evaluations during middle childhood. (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.
Previous research suggests that children develop an increasing concern with fairness over the course of development. Research with adults suggests that the concern with fairness has at least 2 distinct components: a desire to be fair and a desire to signal to others that they are fair. We explore whether children's developing concern with behaving fairly toward others may in part reflect a developing concern with appearing fair to others. In Experiments 1 and 2, most 6- to 8-year-old children behaved fairly toward others when an experimenter was aware of their choices; fewer children opted to behave fairly, however, when they could be unfair to others yet appear fair to the experimenter. In Experiment 3, we explored the development of this concern with appearing fair by using a wider age range (6- to 11-year-olds) and a different method. In this experiment, children chose how to assign a good or bad prize to themselves and another participant by either unilaterally deciding who would get each prize or using a fair procedure-flipping a coin in private. Older children were much more likely to flip the coin than younger children, yet were just as likely as younger children to assign themselves the good prize by reporting winning the coin flip more than chance would dictate. Overall, the results of these experiments suggest that as children grow older they become increasingly concerned with appearing fair to others, which may explain some of their increased tendency to behave fairly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes (and some children with autism) understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality). Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: (1) the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and (2) a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition.
From an early age, children are willing to pay a personal cost to punish others for violations that do not affect them directly. Various motivations underlie such “costly punishment”: People may punish to enforce cooperative norms (amplifying punishment of in-groups) or to express anger at perpetrators (amplifying punishment of out-groups). Thus, group-related values and attitudes (e.g., how much one values fairness or feels out-group hostility) likely shape the development of group-related punishment. The present experiments ( N = 269, ages 3−8 from across the United States) tested whether children’s punishment varies according to their parents’ political ideology—a possible proxy for the value systems transmitted to children intergenerationally. As hypothesized, parents’ self-reported political ideology predicted variation in the punishment behavior of their children. Specifically, parental conservatism was associated with children’s punishment of out-group members, and parental liberalism was associated with children’s punishment of in-group members. These findings demonstrate how differences in group-related ideologies shape punishment across generations.
Responding to wrongdoing is a core feature of our social lives. Indeed, a central assumption of modern institutional justice systems is that transgressors should be punished. In this Review, we synthesize the developmental literature on third-party intervention to provide insight into the types of responses to transgressions that are privileged early in ontogeny. In particular, we focus on young children as both assessors and agents of third-party punishment. With respect to assessment, children have rich expectations about the pursuit of punishment and evaluate those who punish transgressors positively. With respect to agency, children punish wrongdoing even when doing so is costly, and their motives to do so are tethered to a variety of concerns (such as retribution and restoration). Our Review suggests that key concepts in modern institutional justice systems are apparent in early child development, and that third-party punishment is a signature of children’s sophisticated toolkit for regulating social relationships and behaviour. An assumption of modern institutional justice systems is that transgressors should be punished. In this Review, Marshall and McAuliffe synthesize research on whether children expect bystanders to punish others, favour those who do so, and even pursue certain forms of intervention, such as punishment, in response to wrongdoing.
This book raises the idea of a distinct discipline of cultural psychology, the study of the ways that psyche and culture, subject and object, and person and world make up each other. Cultural Psychology is a collection of essays from leading scholars in anthropology, psychology, and linguistics who examine these relationships with special reference to core areas of human development: cognition, learning, self, personality dynamics, and gender. The chapters critically examine such questions as: Is there an intrinsic psychic unity to humankind? Can cultural traditions transform the human psyche, resulting less in psychic unity than in ethnic divergences in mind, self, and emotion? Are psychological processes local or specific to the sociocultural environments in which they are embedded? The volume is an outgrowth of the internationally known Chicago Symposia on Culture and Human Development. It will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of anthropologists, psychologists, linguists, historians, philosophers and hermeneutists interested in the prospects for a distinct discipline of cultural psychology.
People evaluate the moral character of others not only based on what they do, but also on what leads them to do it. Because an agent's state of mind is not directly observable, people typically engage in mindreading—attempts at inferring mental states—when forming moral evaluations. The present paper identifies a general target of such mental state inference, mental occurrents—a catchall term for the thoughts, beliefs, principles, feelings, concerns, and rules accessible in an agent's mind when confronting a morally relevant decision. Moral mental occurrents are those that can provide a moral justification for a particular course of action. Whereas previous mindreading research has examined how people reason back to make sense of an agent's behavior, we instead ask how inferred moral mental occurrents (MOs) constrain moral evaluations for an agent's subsequent actions. Our studies distinguish three accounts of how inferred MOs influence moral evaluations, show that people rely on inferred MOs spontaneously (instead of merely when experimental measures draw attention to them), and identify non-moral contextual cues (e.g., whether the situation demands a quick decision) that guide inferences about MOs. Implications for theory of mind, moral psychology, and social cognition are discussed.
This study examined 106 5- and 6-year-olds' (M = 5.84 years, SD = 0.62) judgments and justifications about psychological harm (e.g., acts such as teasing or excluding others) assessed in three experimental harm salience conditions (highly salient harm, less salient harm, and no harm) crossed with two victims' vulnerability conditions (typical child and vulnerable child). We also examined interactions between these features and parent and child ratings of sympathy. Children evaluated highly salient harm as more unacceptable, more punishable, and more wrong independent of authority and as resulting in victims' more negative emotions than less salient harm and, in turn, no harm. Children reasoned about others' welfare most for highly salient harm stories, whereas children reasoned about less salient harm stories as involving moral and non-moral concerns. In considering victims' vulnerability, children evaluated harm done to typical victims as more wrong than harm done to vulnerable victims. Higher levels of child-reported sympathy were associated with ratings of transgressions as more unacceptable and wrong independent of authority, but only for less salient harm stories. The results demonstrate children's ability to incorporate different features of psychological harm into their moral judgments and highlight the importance of child sympathy in their understanding of more nuanced forms of harm.
In this monograph, we argue for the establishment of a developmental science of politics that describes, explains, and predicts the formation and change of individuals’ political knowledge, attitudes, and behavior beginning in childhood and continuing across the life course. Reflecting our goal of contributing both theoretical conceptualizations and empirical data, we have organized the monograph into two broad sections. In the first section, we outline theoretical contributions that the study of politics may make to developmental science and provide practical reasons that empirical research in the domain of politics is important (e.g., for identifying ways to improve civics education and for encouraging higher voting rates among young adults). We also review major historical approaches to the study of political development and provide an integrative theoretical framework to ground future work. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model as an organizing scheme and emphasizing social justice issues, we describe how factors rooted in cultural contexts, families, and children themselves are likely to shape political development.
In the second section of the monograph, we argue for the importance and utility of studying major political events, such as presidential elections, and introduce the major themes, rationales, and hypotheses for a study of U.S. children's views of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In addition, we apply a social‐justice lens to political thought and participation, addressing the role of gender/sex and race/ethnicity in children's political development broadly, and in their knowledge and views of the 2016 U.S. presidential election specifically. In interviews conducted within the month before and after the election, we examined two overarching categories of children's political attitudes: (a) knowledge, preferences, and expectations about the 2016 election, and (b) knowledge and attitudes concerning gender/sex and politics, particularly relevant for the 2016 election given Hillary Clinton's role as the first female major‐party candidate for the presidency.
Participants were 187 children (101 girls) between 5 and 11 years of age ( M = 8.42 years, SD = 1.45 years). They were recruited from schools and youth organizations in five counties in four U.S. states (Kansas, Kentucky, Texas, and Washington) with varying voting patterns (e.g., Trump voters ranged from 27% to 71% of county voters). The sample was not a nationally representative one, but was racially diverse (35 African American, 50 Latinx, 81 White, and 21 multiracial, Asian American, Middle Eastern, or Native American children). In addition to several child characteristics (e.g., age, social dominance orientation [SDO]), we assessed several family and community characteristics (e.g., child‐reported parental interest in the election and government‐reported county‐level voting patterns, respectively) hypothesized to predict outcome variables.
Although our findings are shaped by the nature of our sample (e.g., our participants were less likely to support Trump than children in larger, nationwide samples were), they offer preliminary insights into children's political development. Overall, children in our sample were interested in and knowledgeable about the presidential election (e.g., a large majority identified the candidates correctly and reported some knowledge about their personal qualities or policy positions). They reported more information about Donald Trump's than Hillary Clinton's policies, largely accounted for by the substantial percentage of children (41%) who referred to Trump's immigration policies (e.g., building a wall between the United States and Mexico). Overall, children reported as many negative as positive personal qualities of the candidates, with negative qualities being reported more often for Trump than for Clinton (56% and 18% of children, respectively). Most children (88%) supported Clinton over Trump, a preference that did not vary by participants’ gender/sex or race/ethnicity. In their responses to an open‐ended inquiry about their reactions to Trump's win, 63% of children reported negative and 18% reported positive emotions. Latinx children reacted more negatively to the election outcome than did White children. Girls’ and boys’ emotional responses to the election outcome did not differ. Children's personal interest in serving as U.S. president did not vary across gender/sex or racial/ethnic groups (overall, 42% were interested). Clinton's loss of the election did not appear to depress (or pique) girls’ interest in becoming U.S. president. With respect to the role of gender/sex in politics, many children (35%) were ignorant about women's absence from the U.S. presidency. Only a single child was able to name a historical individual who worked for women's civil rights or suffrage.
Child characteristics predicted some outcome variables. For example, as expected, older children showed greater knowledge about the candidates than did younger children. Family and community characteristics also predicted some outcome variables. For example, as expected, participants were more likely to support Trump if they perceived that their parents supported him and if Trump received a greater percentage of votes in the children's county of residence.
Our data suggest that civic education should be expanded and reformed. In addition to addressing societal problems requiring political solutions, civics lessons should include the histories of social groups’ political participation, including information about gender discrimination and the women's suffrage movement in U.S. political history. Providing children with environments that are rich in information related to the purpose and value of politics, and with opportunities and encouragement for political thought and action, is potentially beneficial for youth and their nations.
The social mind is tailored to the problem of predicting the mental states and actions of other people. However, social cognition researchers have only scratched the surface of the predictive social mind. We discuss here a new framework for explaining how people organize social knowledge and use it for social prediction. Specifically, we propose a multilayered framework of social cognition in which two hidden layers - the mental states and traits of others - support predictions about the observable layer - the actions of others. A parsimonious set of psychological dimensions structures each layer, and proximity within and across layers guides social prediction. This simple framework formalizes longstanding intuitions from social cognition, and in doing so offers a generative model for deriving new hypotheses about predictive social cognition.
Three studies examined the relationship between people’s moral values (drawing on moral foundations theory) and their willingness to censor immoral acts from children. Results revealed that diverse moral values did not predict censorship judgments. It was not the case that participants who valued loyalty and authority, respectively, sought to censor depictions of disloyal and disobedient acts. Rather, censorship intentions were predicted by a single moral value—sanctity. The more people valued sanctity, the more willing they were to censor from children, regardless of the types of violations depicted (impurity, disloyalty, disobedience, etc.). Furthermore, people who valued sanctity objected to indecent exposure only to apparently innocent and pure children—those who were relatively young and who had not been previously exposed to immoral acts. These data suggest that sanctity, purity, and the preservation of innocence underlie intentions to censor from young children.
Although children demonstrate robust social preferences for ingroup members early in ontogeny, it is not yet clear whether these preferences are based on children generally liking people who are more familiar or on children holding specific biased beliefs about people in their ingroup as compared with people in their outgroup. Here, we investigated the origins of humans’ propensity to link ingroup members with positive behaviors and outgroup members with negative behaviors by asking whether linguistic group membership influences children’s expectations of how people will act. Our findings indicate that the effect of group membership on children’s expectations about other people’s actions varies across both domain (moral and conventional) and age. Whereas all children in our study (3- to 11-year-olds) expected ingroup members to be more likely to conform to social conventions and expected outgroup members to be more likely to break conventional rules, only older children (7- to 11-year-olds) used social group membership to form expectations about which people would be more likely to act morally versus immorally. Thus, younger children do not automatically form biased character judgments based on group membership, although they do understand that social group membership is particularly relevant for reasoning about which people will be more likely to act in line with social norms.
Regarding the effect of the third-person perception on censorship attitudes, the present study first highlighted logical weaknesses of previously proposed rationales and limitations of previously used statistical models to test the effect. This study reanalyzed data from past research on the effect of the third-person perception. In Study 1, the average effects of the other-self perceptual gap in the media influence on censorship attitudes were estimated based on reports from 13 previous studies (total N = 6,414). Study 2 reanalyzed Schmierbach, Boyle, Xu, and McLeod's (2011) correlational data (N = 692). The results of these two studies showed that the presumed effect on others is a stronger predictor of censorship attitudes than the other-self differential in perceived media effect.
Preschoolers have a sophisticated understanding of reward and punishment. Here weinvestigated whether children spontaneously correct unfair punishments. Across twoexperiments, 3- and 4-year-olds engaged in a block-tower building task with a puppetin order to receive a reward (four stickers to be shared between the puppet and the child).The puppet then either accidentally or intentionally knocked over the tower. In both cases,an adult, who did not observe the intentionality of the outcome, punished the puppet bygiving all the stickers to the child. After hearing the puppet protest, children were morelikely to correct the adult’s punishment (i.e., share stickers with the puppet) when pup-pet’s actions were accidental rather than intentional. Our results suggest that rather thanpassively accepting rewards and punishments imposed by authority figures, young childrenspontaneously correct situations they potentially believe are unfair.
Media literacy has become one of the key qualifications for taking part in society. As media technology becomes more intuitive, and media and other social practices intertwine more and more, the present study uses self-determination theory and a needs-oriented approach to media literacy to better understand what makes someone media literate, as well as how media literacy influences social development. The aims of our study were, therefore, (1) to look at the social process of media literacy and its role in the overall social development of children and (2) to examine the social process of mediating media literacy.
Origins and Development of Morality
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.
Both normative theories of ethics in philosophy and contemporary models of moral judgment in psychology have focused almost exclusively on the permissibility of acts, in particular whether acts should be judged on the basis of their material outcomes (consequentialist ethics) or on the basis of rules, duties, and obligations (deontological ethics). However, a longstanding third perspective on morality, virtue ethics, may offer a richer descriptive account of a wide range of lay moral judgments. Building on this ethical tradition, we offer a person-centered account of moral judgment, which focuses on individuals as the unit of analysis for moral evaluations rather than on acts. Because social perceivers are fundamentally motivated to acquire information about the moral character of others, features of an act that seem most informative of character often hold more weight than either the consequences of the act or whether a moral rule has been broken. This approach, we argue, can account for numerous empirical findings that are either not predicted by current theories of moral psychology or are simply categorized as biases or irrational quirks in the way individuals make moral judgments.
© The Author(s) 2014.
Recent work suggests a strong connection between intuitions regarding our own free will and our moral behavior. We investigate the origins of this link by asking whether preschool-aged children construe their own moral actions as freely chosen. We gave children the option to make three moral/social choices (avoiding harm to another, following a rule, and following peer behavior) and then asked them to retrospect as to whether they were free to have done otherwise. When given the choice to act (either morally or immorally), children avoided harm and abided by rules, but they endorsed their freedom to have done otherwise. When choice was restricted by adult instruction, children did not endorse their free choice and indicated feeling constrained by moral obligation in their explanatory responses. These results suggest that children believe that their moral actions afford free will, but this belief is dependent on their experience of choice.
Recent research in developmental psychology shows that children understand several principles of fairness by 3 years of age, much earlier than previously believed. However, children's knowledge of fairness does not always align with their behavior, and immediate self-interest alone cannot explain this gap. In this forum paper, we consider two factors that influence the relation between fairness knowledge and behavior: relative advantage and how rewards are acquired.
Animals—human and nonhuman alike—rarely prefer close genetic relatives as sexual partners. Moreover, in the lab and in real life, humans typically react to thoughts of sex with their family members with extreme aversion. Scientists generally agree about why such aversions exist: The sexual avoidance of close genetic relatives evolved because the offspring of close relatives suffer increased risks of disease and death. But how do these sexual aversions develop? Recent research has addressed this question by focusing on people’s aversions to sex with their siblings. Researchers have discovered a set of cues people use during development to estimate whether someone in their social world is likely to be a sibling. When present, these cues typically lead to the development of intense sexual aversions. When the cues are absent, as they are when siblings are reared apart, kin-based sexual aversions tend not to develop. This article discusses the kinship cues regulating the development of sibling sexual aversions and recent work suggesting that the intensity of people’s sibling-directed sexual aversions colors their moral attitudes regarding the sexual behavior of others. Taken together, research on human inbreeding avoidance addresses fundamental questions pertaining to development and mate choice, as well as morality and social policy.
We offer the first large scale, multiple source analysis of the outcome of what may be the most extensive effort to selectively censor human expression ever implemented. To do this, we have devised a system to locate, download, and analyze the content of millions of social media posts originating from nearly 1,400 different social media services all over China before the Chinese government is able to find, evaluate, and censor (i.e., remove from the Internet) the large subset they deem objectionable. Using modern computer-assisted text analytic methods that we adapt and validate in the Chinese language, we compare the substantive content of posts censored to those not censored over time in each of 95 issue areas. Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collection action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future --- and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent, such as examples we offer where sharp increases in censorship presage government action outside the Internet.
The present study examines preschoolers' judgments about responses to hypothetical aggressive provocation. Ninety-nine preschool children were read two stories, one depicting an overt provocation and the other depicting a relational provocation. Following each story, children were interviewed to assess their normative (what a peer would do) and prescriptive (what a peer should do) judgments about the victim's behavior. Additionally, perceptions about the relative degree of badness of different types of aggressive responses (physical, verbal, and relational) to the provocation were assessed. The results showed several significant effects with respect to aggression type, age, participant gender, and story-character gender. For example, in both of the provocation situations, participants reported that overtly aggressive responses (physical and verbal) would happen more often than they should happen. Moreover, in both the provocation situations, participants felt that relationally aggressive responses were mo...
A study was conducted to determine whether the moral judgments of adults and children take into account circumstances which in a legal sense tend to justify or excuse intentional, harm-doing actions. Subjects (first graders, fourth graders, and adults) were presented with a vignette in which 1 child harmed another. For half the subjects, information designed to constitute a valid legal defense was appended; for the other half, no such mitigating circumstance was presented. In various vignettes the legal defenses of necessity, public duty, and provocation were instantiated. The results indicated that each mitigating circumstance led to less recommended punishment for the harm-doing act and that this was so across the entire age range (5-44 years) sampled. The lack of a clear developmental result as well as the implications of these findings for the utility of employing a legal analogy for investigating the development of moral judgments are discussed.
Between the ages of 4 and 8 children increasingly make moral judgments on the basis of an actor's intent, as opposed to the outcome that the actor brings about. Does this reflect a reorganization of concepts in the moral domain, or simply the development of capacities outside the moral domain such as theory of mind and executive function? Motivated by the past evidence that adults rely partially on outcome-based judgment for judgments of deserved punishment, but not for judgments of moral wrongness, we explore the same categories of judgment in young children. We find that intent-based judgments emerge first in children's assessments of naughtiness and that this subsequently constrains their judgments of deserved punishment. We also find that this developmental trajectory differs for judgments of accidental harm (a bad outcome with benign intent) and judgments of attempted harm (a benign outcome with bad intent). Our findings support a two process model derived from studies of adults: a mental-state based process of judging wrongness constrains an outcome-based process of assigning punishment. The emergence of this two-process architecture in childhood suggests that the developmental shift from outcome- to intent-based judgment involves a conceptual reorganization within the moral domain.
Media literacy is a term that means many different things to different people???scholars, educators, citizen activists, and the general public. This article reviews the variety of definitions and presents a synthesis of commonalities that most definitions of media literacy share. The review presents an overview of how media literacy has been treated as an issue in curriculum design within the institution of education, and then how it has been treated as an intervention by parents and researchers.
Conducted 3 studies of preschoolers' judgments of moral and personal rules when the content and consequences were controlled. 122 children (aged 36–72 mo) were interviewed about punishment, importance, and authority. They considered moral transgressions to be more wrong than personal rule violations, and thought that moral rule violators deserved punishment and should receive greater punishment than personal rule violators. These results were stronger for the older Ss than the younger Ss. With regard to authority, Ss indicated that it would not be legitimate for mothers to permit moral and personal transgressions to occur, but when the transgressions were permitted, moral violations but not personal violations were considered wrong. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)