Abstract
Typically, adults give a primary role to the agent’s intention to harm when performing a moral judgment of accidental harm. By contrast, children often focus on outcomes, underestimating the actor’s mental states when judging someone for his action, and rely on what we suppose to be intuitive and emotional processes. The present study explored the processes involved in the development of the capacity to integrate agents’ intentions into their moral judgment of accidental harm in 5 to 8-year-old children. This was done by the use of different metacognitive trainings reinforcing different abilities involved in moral judgments (mentalising abilities, executive abilities, or no reinforcement), similar to a paradigm previously used in the field of deductive logic. Children’s moral judgments were gathered before and after the training with non-verbal cartoons depicting agents whose actions differed only based on their causal role or their intention to harm. We demonstrated that a metacognitive training could induce an important shift in children’s moral abilities, showing that only children who were explicitly instructed to “not focus too much” on the consequences of accidental harm, preferentially weighted the agents’ intentions in their moral judgments. Our findings confirm that children between the ages of 5 and 8 are sensitive to the intention of agents, however, at that age, this ability is insufficient in order to give a “mature” moral judgment. Our experiment is the first that suggests the critical role of inhibitory resources in processing accidental harm.
Highlights
Multiple factors are considered to influence our moral judgment competencies (Cushman et al, 2010; Young and Dungan, 2011)
This paper aims to explore the validity of a dual process architecture in order to understand an important landmark in children’s moral development: the ability to generate intent-based moral judgments
A total of 102 children participated, but 30 children were removed from the analysis
Summary
Multiple factors are considered to influence our moral judgment competencies (Cushman et al, 2010; Young and Dungan, 2011). Later studies, using more various and child-friendly methodologies, have refined the initial developmental pattern proposed by Piaget They have reported that under optimized conditions (e.g., stimuli including an explicit and salient description of the protagonist’s mental states; showing stimuli by pairs of stories differing on only one criteria, i.e., intentions or outcomes), preschoolers between the age of 3 and 5 could be able to judge someone committing intentional harm as naughtier than someone committing accidental harm (Nelson, 1980; Baird and Astington, 2004; Nobes et al, 2009; Cushman et al, 2013, but see Imamoglu, 1975; Zelazo et al, 1996; Helwig et al, 2001). What could be the cognitive mechanisms underlying this late moral development?
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