Abstract
Influential theories on moral judgments propose that they rely either on emotions or on innate moral principles. In contrast, the mental model theory postulates that moral judgments rely on reasoning, either intuition or deliberation. The theory allows for the possibility that intuitions lead to utilitarian judgments. This paper reports two experiments involving fifth-grade children, adolescents, and adults; the results revealed that children reason intuitively to resolve moral dilemmas in which action and inaction lead to different outcomes. In particular, the results showed female children to be more utilitarian than female adults in resolving classical moral dilemmas: they preferred an action that achieved a good outcome for a greater number of people. Within the mental model theory's framework there is no reason to expect that females and males differ in their ability to reason, but at the moment the results for females cannot be generalized to males who were not properly represented in the adults groups of the two experiments. The result revealing that (female) children are more utilitarian than (female) adults, which is hard to explain via many current theories, was predicted by the mental model theory.
Highlights
Moral judgments pervade our daily life; we often engage in considerations on whether an action is morally permissible or impermissible
The crucial prediction was confirmed (Prediction 1): children were not affected by the experimental manipulation: the production of “permissible” judgments was comparable in the two versions of the dilemmas (Wilcoxon test: z = 0.88, p > 0.250, Cliff ’s δ = 0.02)
The overall results of the experiment confirmed the prediction that with classical moral dilemmas female children are more utilitarian than female adults; as the participants in the adults group were not balanced by gender, at the moment the results cannot be generalized to males
Summary
Moral judgments pervade our daily life; we often engage in considerations on whether an action is morally permissible or impermissible. The assumption underlying my investigation is that moral judgments of this sort are grounded on reasoning. This idea was first introduced in psychology by Piaget (1965/1932) and Kohlberg (1984), who tackled the question of which processes are involved in moral judgment from a developmental perspective. They reported on many dialogs conducted with children illustrating how they reason about what is right and what is wrong. There are no studies confronting the predictions of these theories in a population of children; they could enforce the assumptions of one of these theories with respect to the other
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