Portuguese Children's Judgements of Moral, Prosocial, and Academic Norms: Duty or Aspiration?

Abstract

Borrowing from Fuller's distinction between duty and aspiration, we examined Portuguese children's attributions of credit and blame for good and bad deeds in moral, prosocial, and academic norms. In addition, we made crosscultural comparisons with US and Japanese children, and suggested that the frequently reported tendency for children to give more weight to negative outcomes than positive ones may be due to a common belief (i.e. "fundamental-education error") that states that people should not have to be praised for doing what they should do, but should always be blamed or punished for misbehaviour. A total of 81 children aged from 5 to 10 were presented with moral, prosocial, and academic scenarios representing either adherences to, or violations of, norms. Children's own judgements of credit and blame, and children's predictions of what their teachers would do if forced to choose between sanctioning a positive and a negative act were assessed. The results showed that: (1) Portuguese children's attributions of credit and blame for moral and academic norms were similar to those observed for US and Japanese children with regard to a rank order of domains, but not in absolute terms; (2) at an early age, Portuguese children commit the "fundamental-education error"; and (3) the duty-aspiration asymmetry is not as pervasive as has been claimed.