Admiration in adolescents’ judgments on situations involving hurting

Abstract

This article aims to characterize judgments about situations that involve causing harm and investigate whether judgments of situations in which participants' idols differed from judgments made for episodes involving generic characters. The research used two questionnaires: the sociodemographic questionnaire and the questionnaire on the interference of admiration in judgments about causing harm, applied to 63 adolescents aged between 12 and 18 years old. A coding system was developed based on the participants' responses, guided by the principles of Social Domain Theory, going through a rigorous process of dialogical reliability between researchers specialized in the subject. This coding system resulted in the following analysis categories: moral concern (justice, empathy, differences, and moral intervention), conventional concern (social expectation, legislation, religion, parental authority, and conventional intervention), concern with the situation (situational) and in others (it depends, and without justification). Additionally, a quantitative analysis was conducted using the method of dialogical reliability to map the presence of the five criteria of the moral domain: concern for others, adherence to the rule, generalization of the rule, independence from authority, and universalization of the rule, aiming to determine which elements hindered or facilitated the categorization of responses within the moral domain. The comparison between judgments involving generic characters and idols was conducted using the Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney tests to ascertain the presence of significant differences between the judgments. The results indicated that admiration did not interfere with judgments in three of the four situations (accidental harm, psychological harm, and benefit), suggesting that the majority of adolescents judged situations with justifications that did not consider concern for causing harm to others. Further research needs to be conducted to investigate why there are few moral responses in judgments about different situations involving harm.