Social Conventional Transgressions Research Articles

Does Beauty Matter? The Effect of Perceived Attractiveness on Children’s Moral Judgments of Harmful Actions against Animals

The current research asks whether children’s judgments of harmful actions toward animals depend on animals’ perceived attractiveness. In Study 1, primary school children ( N = 359) rated the perceived attractiveness of six animals and judged how severe it is to hurt them, as compared to moral transgressions, social-conventional transgressions, and personal choices. Hurting attractive animals was perceived as severe as hurting another child, while hurting unattractive animals was evaluated as less serious than social-conventional transgressions. In Study 2, we experimentally tested whether the attractiveness of animals rated as unattractive in Study 1 could be influenced by an environmental education intervention. After the intervention, children in the experimental group ( N = 21) rated unattractive animals as more attractive than before the intervention, and this led to judging harming these animals more severely than before the intervention. No changes were found in the control group ( N = 20).

Self-Reported Moral Emotions and Physical and Relational Aggression in Early Childhood: A Social Domain Approach.

This study examined discrepancies between 4- and 7-year-olds' (n=135; Mage =5.65) self-reported affect following hypothetical moral versus social-conventional transgressions and their associations with teacher-rated physical and relational aggression concurrently and 9-months later. Negative emotion ratings in response to prototypical moral transgressions were not associated with children's aggression. When transgressions were described as no longer prohibited by rules and authority figures, children reporting more negative affect in response to moral as compared to conventional violations were less physically aggressive at Wave 1 and showed relative and mean-level declines in physical aggression over time. Relational aggression was not associated with self-reported emotions. Findings indicate the importance of distinguishing between types of transgressions and forms of aggression in studying moral emotions.

Children’s strategies for self-correcting their social and moral transgressions and perceived personal shortcomings: Implications for moral agency

Previous research has found that when children engage in social and moral transgressions, they take steps to either remedy or explain their behavior. However, no prior systematic investigation has examined the strategies children employ to ‘correct’ their behavior in future situations. The present study employed a domain theory lens to investigate developmental changes in children’s self-reported strategies for self-correcting their moral and social conventional transgressions as well as adjusting self-perceived personal shortcomings. Participants were 100 children from two regions of the US distributed across five age groups, six-, eight-, 10-, 12- and 16-years. Findings from interviews revealed significant differences in strategies for self-correction by domain and age. Implications for expanding our definitions of moral agency and improving social and emotional learning (SEL) programs are discussed.

Neural correlates of conventional and harm/welfare-based moral decision-making.

The degree to which social norms are processed by a unitary system or dissociable systems remains debated. Much research on children's social-cognitive judgments has supported the distinction between "moral" (harm/welfare-based) and "conventional" norms. However, the extent to which these norms are processed by dissociable neural systems remains unclear. To address this issue, 23 healthy participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they rated the wrongness of harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions and neutral vignettes. Activation significantly greater than the neutral vignette baseline was observed in regions implicated in decision-making regions including rostral/ventral medial frontal, anterior insula and dorsomedial frontal cortices when evaluating both harm/welfare-based and social-conventional transgressions. Greater activation when rating harm/welfare-based relative to social-conventional transgressions was seen through much of ACC and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Greater activation was observed in superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left PCC, and temporal-parietal junction when rating social-conventional transgressions relative to harm/welfare-based transgressions. These data suggest that decisions regarding the wrongness of actions, irrespective of whether they involve care/harm-based or conventional transgressions, recruit regions generally implicated in affect-based decision-making. However, there is neural differentiation between harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions. This may reflect the particular importance of processing the intent of transgressors of conventional norms and perhaps the greater emotional content or salience of harm/welfare-based transgressions.

Moral and Social Reasoning in Autism Spectrum Disorders

This study compared moral and social reasoning in individuals with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Ten familiar schoolyard transgressions were shown to 18 participants with and 18 participants without ASD. They judged the appropriateness of the behavior and explained their judgments. Analysis of the rationales revealed that participants with typical development used significantly more abstract rules than participants with ASD, who provided more nonspecific condemnations of the behaviors. Both groups judged social conventional transgressions to be more context-bound than moral transgressions, with this distinction more pronounced in typically developing individuals, who also provided significantly more examples of situations in which the depicted behaviors would be acceptable. The educational implications of these findings for individuals with ASD are discussed.

Do children play fair with mother nature? Understanding children’s judgments of environmentally harmful actions

The current study asks how young children judge behaviors that harm the environment as compared to moral transgressions, social-conventional transgressions, and personal choices. This study also questions whether children are more likely to cite biocentric or homocentric reasons when justifying their judgments of environmentally harmful behaviors. To answer these questions, sixty-one 6–10 year olds were asked to judge the severity of various actions that impact the environment. For comparison, participants also judged moral transgressions, social-conventional transgressions, and personal choices. Children judged actions that harm the environment more severely than social-conventional transgressions but not as severely as moral transgressions. When justifying their judgments of these environmentally harmful behaviors, participants were more likely to reference biocentric reasons as compared to homocentric reasons. The findings suggest that children perceive harm to the environment as bad, but harm to humans as worse.

Linking Wrongdoing and Consequence: A Developmental Analysis of Children's Punishment Orientation

Young children's ability to use open-ended punishment decisions as a way of distinguishing between different types of transgressions (moral, safety-related, and social-conventional) was examined. A structured interview based on a series of 6 transgression vignettes was administered to 20 children in each of 3 age groups: 4 to 5 years old, 7 to 8 years old, and 10 to 11 years old. Intensity ratings of the children's punishment decisions suggested that they found moral transgressions to be those least acceptable to violate, followed by safety-related, and finally social-conventional transgressions. Children's open-ended punishment choices also revealed the belief, regardless of age, that moral transgressions should be punished more than safety-related or social-conventional transgressions. In addition, analyses of the justifications children provided for their punishment choices revealed that with increasing age children are more likely to recognize the preventive function of punishment and the negative consequences believed to be associated with moral, safety-related, and social-conventional wrongdoings.

Socialization and Social Judgments among Inner-City African-American Kindergartners

This study explores the relations between certain socialization experiences and social judgments among poor, inner-city African-American kindergartners. 54 mothers and their children took part in this investigation. Consistent with the domain distinction literature, children made judgments about the seriousness, rule contingency, context contingency, and punishment deserved for familiar moral and social-conventional transgressions. Mothers were queried regarding their child-rearing values and discipline practices and described their children's peer network and social experiences. Results indicated that children distinguished between moral and social-conventional issues when explaining why they were wrong and in terms of rule and home context contingency criteria, but not the other judgment criteria. Mothers placed high value on conformity and most often ignored or talked to children about their misbehavior. More frequent use of talking, less ignoring, and less denial of privileges by mothers predicted children's making the domain distinction. Discussion focuses on methodological limitations and directions for future research.

The Understanding of Morality, Convention, and Personal Preference in an African Setting

Forty-three Zambian secondary school teachers and 121 of their students were interviewed to examine distinctions between direct moral, belief-mediated moral, social-conventional, and personal events. Additionally, 17 Zambian villagers and 15 American college students made judgments about a belief-mediated moral event Two main predictions were made: Zambian secondary school teachers and students would make distinctions between the four types of events, and subjects' understanding of belief-mediated moral and social-conventional transgressions would be patterned by sociocultural orientations. These predictions were confirmed. Discussed and deduced from the results is the proposition that as applied to individuals per se the concepts of unfairness, harm, justice, violation of human rights, and obligation form an insufficient basis for morality. A collective sense of well-being should, in addition, be part of this foundation.

Context and quantitative dimension of social conventional transgressions: Is it more serious at home or at school?

The aim of this experiment was to know whether the same transgressions were judged of different seriousness depending on their context of occurrence, and whether subjects’ judgements varied according to age.

Abused, Neglected, and Nonmaltreated Children's Conceptions of Moral and Social-Conventional Transgressions

Abused, Neglected, and Nonmaltreated Children's Conceptions of Moral and Social-Conventional Transgressions

Abused, Neglected, and Nonmaltreated Children's Conceptions of Moral and Social-Conventional Transgressions

The effect of child maltreatment on children's social-cognitive development was examined by investigating abused, neglected, and nonmaltreated children's judgments regarding the permissibility of social-conventional and moral transgressions pertaining to physical harm, psychological distress, and the unfair distribution of resources. Abused and neglected children and a control group of nonmaltreated children matched on IQ, age, and social class judged the seriousness, deserved punishment, generalizability, and rule contingency of familiar transgressions for themselves and others. Abused subjects were more likely than neglected subjects to consider psychological distress to be universally wrong for others; neglected subjects were more likely than abused subjects to judge the unfair distribution of resources to be universally wrong for themselves. Abused and control children, but not neglected children, judged all transgressions to deserve more punishment when committed by others than when committed by the self. All children distinguished between morality and social convention and between different types of moral transgressions on all 4 criteria. Furthermore, all children were more egocentric in their judgments for the self than for others. These findings are discussed in relation to research on the effects of child maltreatment and on moral judgment.

Children'S Social Interactions and Social Concepts

Observations and interviews were conducted in the Virgin Islands to examine the forms of responses adults and preschool children provided to moral and social conventional transgressions, and to determine whether children and adolescents made a conceptual distinction between morality and convention. Findings from both portions of the study paralled outcomes of previous observational and interview studies conducted with subjects in the United States. The observations in Virgin Islands preschools revealed that the responses of both adults and children to social conventional events differed from their responses to moral events. Both children's and adults' responses to moral events focused upon the intrinsic (hurtful or unjust) consequences of the actions upon victims. In contrast, the responses of both children and adults to transgressions of social conventions revolved around aspects of social order.Two forms of convention were observed: conventional school regulations and general conventions. Almost all responses to transgressions of conventional school regulations were initiated by adults. Children and adults responded with equal frequency to transgressions of general conventions. Interviews conducted with the preschool children revealed that they discriminated between the observed moral and conventional transgressions. These results were concordant with findings from interviews in the second portion of the study that older children and adolescents of the Virgin Islands treated conventional but not moral issues as relative.

Children's Responses to Moral and Social Conventional Transgressions in Free-Play Settings

NuccI, LARRY P., and NuccI, MARIA SANTIAGO. Children's Responses to Moral and Social Conventional Transgressions in Free-Play Settings. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 1337-1342. Observations were conducted of children's responses to naturally occurring moral and social conventional transgressions during unsupervised free play in 10 playgrounds. Findings paralleled results of previous observational studies conducted in adult-governed (school) contexts. It was found that children responded to both moral and conventional forms of transgression. Responses of both the younger (7-10-year-old) and older (11-14-year-old) children to moral transgressions revolved around the intrinsic (hurtful and unjust) consequences of acts upon victims. Children's responses to conventional breaches, in contrast, focused on aspects of the social order (i.e., rules, normative expectations). Sex differences in the usage of specific forms of response to moral and conventional breaches were found.

Children's Responses to Moral and Social Conventional Transgressions in Free-Play Settings

Children's Responses to Moral and Social Conventional Transgressions in Free-Play Settings

Children's Social Interactions in the Context of Moral and Conventional Transgressions

NuccI, LARRY P., and Nucci, MARIA SANTIAGO. Children's Social Interactions in the Context of Moral and Conventional Transgressions. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 403-412. Observations were made in 10 schools at the second, fifth-, and seventh-grade levels of the forms of responses teachers and children provided to moral and social conventional transgressions. A total of 439 moral and 1,045 social conventional events were observed. It was found that the responses of both teachers and children to social conventional events differed from their responses to moral events. Children were much more likely to respond to moral events than to conventional events. Their responses to moral events revolved around the intrinsic (hurtful or unjust) consequences of the actions upon victims. Children's responses to conventional transgressions focused on aspects of the social order (that is, rules, normative expectations). Children showed an increased tendency to respond to convention with age. Teachers were more likely to respond to social conventional than to moral events. Their responses to the two forms of transgression complemented the responses made by children. Both the teacher and child forms of response to transgression changed with child age. In a second aspect of the study it was found, through interviews of children about ongoing events, that the children made a conceptual discrimination between the observed moral and conventional events.

Social Interactions and the Development of Social Concepts in Preschool Children

Nucci, LARRY P., and TURIEL, ELLIOT. Social Interactions and the Development of Social Concepts in Preschool Children. CmLD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 400-407. Observations were made in 10 preschools of interactions in 2 domains of social events: social conventional and moral. On the basis of criteria defining each domain, observed events could be reliably classified as social conventional or moral. As another aspect of the study, an interview was administered to children from the preschool who had witnessed the same events as the observer. The children's view of the events as social conventional or moral was in agreement with our classifications of the events in 83% of the cases. It was hypothesized that the responses of both children and adults to social conventional events differ from their responses to moral events. Observed behaviors were rated on a standard checklist of response categories. Different types of responses were elicited by the 2 types of events. Almost all responses to social conventional transgressions were initiated by adults. Children and adults responded with equal frequency to moral transgressions. Adults responded to social conventional transgressions differently from the ways they reacted to moral transgressions.