Children's utilization of emotion expectancies in moral decision-making

Abstract

This study investigated the relevance of emotion expectancies for children's moral decision-making. The sample included 131 participants from three different grade levels (M = 8.39 years, SD = 2.45, range 4.58-12.42). Participants were presented a set of scenarios that described various emotional outcomes of (im)moral actions and asked to decide what they would do if they were in the protagonists' shoes. Overall, it was found that the anticipation of moral emotions predicted an increased likelihood of moral choices in antisocial and prosocial contexts. In younger children, anticipated moral emotions predicted moral choice for prosocial actions, but not for antisocial actions. Older children showed evidence for the utilization of anticipated emotions in both prosocial and antisocial behaviours. Moreover, for older children, the decision to act prosocially was less likely in the presence of non-moral emotions. Findings suggest that the impact of emotion expectancies on children's moral decision-making increases with age. Contrary to happy victimizer research, the study does not support the notion that young children use moral emotion expectancies for moral decision-making in the context of antisocial actions.