Abstract
From a young age, children understand and enforce moral norms, which are aimed at preserving the rights and welfare of others. Children also distinguish moral norms from other types of norms such as conventional norms, which serve to ensure coordination within social groups or institutions. However, far less is known about the mechanisms driving this differentiation. This article investigates the role of internal arousal in distinguishing moral from conventional norms. In a between-subjects design, 3-year-olds (n = 32), 4-year-olds (n = 34), and undergraduate students (n = 64) watched a video of either a moral norm violation (e.g., destroying another person’s artwork) or a conventional norm violation (e.g., playing a game wrong). Participants of all age groups showed differential physiological arousal (pupil dilation) to moral and conventional norm violations. Participants of all age groups also attended significantly more to the victim of the moral transgression than the bystander in the conventional transgression. Further, this differential attention to the victim/bystander positively correlated with the change in participants’ phasic pupil dilation to the norm violation. This is the first evidence that differences in internal arousal co-occur with (and possibly contribute to) the distinction that even young children draw between moral and conventional norms.
Highlights
Human group living and cooperation rely heavily on social norms that regulate how one ought to behave (Boyd and Richerson, 2009; Killen and Smetana, 2015)
In support of the hypothesis that moral transgressions elicit a different pattern of arousal compared to conventional transgressions, we found that participants’ pupil size increased more during the moral (M = 0.10, SD = 0.15) than the conventional transgression (M = 0.01, SD = 0.14), F(1,112) = 11.50, p = 0.001, η2 = 0.09
Prior behavioral work has consistently shown that children as young as 3 years of age can distinguish moral norms from conventional norms and treat moral violations as more serious and moral transgressors as more deserving of punishment (Smetana et al, 2018)
Summary
Human group living and cooperation rely heavily on social norms that regulate how one ought to behave (Boyd and Richerson, 2009; Killen and Smetana, 2015). These norms are often enforced by adults—and even young children—to ensure fair treatment of others and harmonious group living by protesting, punishing, or tattling on norm violators (Rakoczy et al, 2008; Balafoutas and Nikiforakis, 2012; Gummerum and Chu, 2014; Riedl et al, 2015; Yucel and Vaish, 2018). 3-year-olds protest when a puppet attempts to
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