Socio-moral Evaluations Research Articles

Children's Navigation of Contextual Cues in Peer Transgressions: The Role of Aggression Form, Transgressor Gender, and Transgressor Intention.

When faced with transgressions in their peer groups, children must navigate a series of situational cues (e.g., type of transgression, transgressor gender, transgressor intentionality) to evaluate the moral status of transgressions and to inform their subsequent behavior toward the transgressors. There is little research on which cues children prioritize when presented together, how reliance on these cues may be affected by certain biases (e.g., gender norms), or how the prioritization of these cues may change with age. To explore these questions, 138 5- to 7-year-olds (younger children) and 8- to 10-year-olds (older children) evaluated a series of boy and girl characters who partook in physical or relational aggression with ambiguous or purposeful intent. Children were asked to provide sociomoral evaluations (i.e., acceptability, punishment, and intention attribution judgments) and social preferences. Transgressor gender only impacted children’s social preferences. Conversely, aggression form and transgressor intent shifted children’s sociomoral judgments: they were harsher toward physical transgressors with purposeful intent over those with ambiguous intent but made similar evaluations for relational transgressors regardless of intentionality. The present results suggest that gender is perhaps not uniformly relevant to children across all contexts, as other cues were prioritized for children’s sociomoral judgments. Since children likely have less familiarity with relational aggression compared to physical aggression, it follows that intent would only shift judgments about physical transgressors. This research provides insight about how children simultaneously navigate multiple cues in aggression contexts, which is likely reflective of their real-world experiences.

Moral masters or moral apprentices? A connectionist account of sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants

Numerous studies suggest that preverbal infants possess the ability to make sociomoral judgements and demonstrate a preference for prosocial agents. Some theorists argue that infants possess an “innate moral core” that guides their sociomoral reasoning. However, we propose that infants’ capacity for putative sociomoral evaluation and reasoning can just as likely be driven by a domain-general associative-learning mechanism that is sensitive to agent action. We implement this theoretical account in a connectionist computational model and show that it can account for the pattern of results in Hamlin et al. (2007), Hamlin and Wynn (2011), Hamlin (2013), and Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, and Mahajan (2011). These are pioneering studies in this area and were among the first to examine sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Based on the results of 9 computer simulations, we suggest that an associative-learning mechanism—instantiated as a computational (connectionist) model—can account for previous findings on preverbal infants’ capacity for sociomoral evaluation. These results suggest that an innate moral core may not be necessary to account for sociomoral evaluation in infants.

Neural and self-reported responses to antisocial news stories: Entertaining versus traditional news introduction

Recently, as entertainment programs have become more prevalent in the news media, there is a growing need to understand how entertainment appeal influences viewers' sociomoral evaluation of news content. We investigated neural and self-reported moral evaluation of antisocial news content in college students who viewed real-life news reports featuring moral violations inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scanner. Each news report was preceded by a traditional or entertaining style of introduction. The behavioral results showed that antisocial severity was reduced for antisocial news content that was presented following entertaining news introductions versus traditional news introductions. The fMRI results showed that entertainment news introductions tax more cognitive control resources than traditional news introductions during news processing, as indicated by greater activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal region; however, they diminish moral saliency, as suggested by the reduced activation in the medial prefrontal region. We also found that greater dorsolateral prefrontal activation during the early phase of news reports was associated with more lenient moral acceptability ratings in the entertainment condition. Furthermore, reduced functional connectivity of the mentalizing brain network was observed in the entertainment condition when compared with the traditional condition. These results suggest that entertainment appeal may increase resource depletion, diminish moral sensitivity, and reduce functional integration of relevant social information during news processing, thus hindering viewers' moral scrutiny. This novel study contributes to a better understanding of how entertainment features influence viewers’ sociomoral evaluation of news stories.

Children’s Evaluations of Informants and their Surprising Claims in Direct and Overheard Contexts

ABSTRACT Children are known to accept communicated information, even when it contradicts their own judgments. Here, we explored the role of direct address and accuracy in children’s testimonial decisions and socio-moral evaluations of the speaker. After 4-year-old children (N = 100) gave baseline classification responses for four hybrid animals, an adult speaker either directly told the child information that was in conflict with children’s original judgment, or communicated the same information to a third party over the phone. Children accepted new information in both contexts but were more receptive to surprising claims when the information was communicated to them directly than when it was overheard. Once children learned about the accuracy of the testimony they received, their subsequent socio-moral decisions to reciprocate and share information with the speaker were influenced by the accuracy of the speaker’s testimony, and not by the manner of address.

Do 15-month-old infants prefer helpers? A replication of Hamlin et al. (2007).

Hamlin et al. found in 2007 that preverbal infants displayed a preference for helpers over hinderers. The robustness of this finding and the conditions under which infant sociomoral evaluation can be elicited has since been debated. Here, we conducted a replication of the original study, in which we tested 14- to 16-month-olds using a familiarization procedure with three-dimensional animated video stimuli. Unlike previous replication attempts, ours uniquely benefited from detailed procedural advice by Hamlin. In contrast with the original results, only 16 out of 32 infants (50%) in our study reached for the helper; thus, we were not able to replicate the findings. A possible reason for this failure is that infants' preference for prosocial agents may not be reliably elicited with the procedure and stimuli adopted. Alternatively, the effect size of infants’ preference may be smaller than originally estimated. The study addresses ongoing methodological debates on the replicability of influential findings in infant cognition.

Third-Party Sociomoral Evaluations in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

We examined explicit and implicit processes in response to third-party moral transgressions in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty 4- to 7-year-old children with ASD and 19 typically developing controls evaluated dynamic visual stimuli depicting intentional or accidental harm to persons or damage to objects. Moral evaluations, eye fixations, and pupil dilations toward the stimuli were collected. Results indicate a preserved capacity to understand the mental states of perpetrators and an implicit moral sensitivity to the third-party harms in children with ASD. Nonetheless, children with ASD showed specific sensitivity and emotional arousal when viewing damage to objects. These findings contribute to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of moral reasoning in ASD and its possible association with the autistic symptoms.

Do Infants Attribute Moral Traits? Fourteen-Month-Olds' Expectations of Fairness Are Affected by Agents' Antisocial Actions.

We investigated whether and how infants link the domains of harm, help and fairness. Fourteen-month-old infants were familiarized with a character that either helped or hindered another agent's attempts to reach the top of a hill. Then, in the test phase they saw the helper or the hinderer carrying out an equal or an unequal distribution toward two identical recipients. Infants who saw the helper performing an unequal distribution looked longer than those who saw the helper performing an equal distribution, whereas infants who saw the hinderer performing an unequal distribution looked equally long than those who saw the hinderer performing an equal distribution. These results suggest that infants linked the hindering actions to a diminished propensity for distributive fairness. This provides support for theories that posit an early emerging ability to attribute moral traits to agents and to generate socio-moral evaluations of their actions.RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS - Infants expect agents that previously helped another agent to perform egalitarian distributions, but they do not generate such expectation about agents that previously hindered another agent.- This ability to link hindering and distributive actions is important because it may help the development of reasoning about agents' stable moral traits.- Results provide support for recent theories on early social evaluation skills and they constraint theories on the acquisition of moral competence.

Особенности самоотношения студентов вуза, занимающихся и не занимающихся спортом, в связи с самовосприятием физической и эстетической модальностей Я-образа

The paper (a) examines psychological features of self-attitude in students involved and not involved in sports; (b) analyzes features of self-perception in students involved in gender-specific and gender-non-specific sports by means of categories of self-image, physical self, and aesthetic self; (c) proves that bodily perception of self-image influences self-attitude in students while studying at university.
 Studying students’ self-attitude in early youth is of interest because it is the period of active interpersonal interaction, finding of their own place in the world, entering the system of social reproduction, forming socio-moral evaluations, social adaptation through sports activities.
 The theoretical section describes the main concepts of self-attitude in domestic and foreign psychology, as well as features of the development of self-attitude in students. The analysis emphasizes the influence of (a) bodily perception on self-attitude in students involved in gender-specific and gender-non-specific sports, as well as (b) sports specialization on ego-identity of the person.
 The empirical study revealed (a) the main principles of self-attitude in university students involved and not involved in sports in relation to self-perception of physical and aesthetic modalities of self-image; (b) associations among personal qualities, gender identity, social adaptiveness, and modality of self-concept.
 The findings of the statistical analysis confirmed the credibility of the studies and conclusions. The final section concludes with a summary. The results are of direct practical relevance.
 The methodological tools of the study included the following: (a) S. Bem Gender Identity Questionnaire; (b) M. Kuhn and T. McPartland Twenty Statements Test; (c) S. R. Pantileev technique for studying self-attitude “MIS”; (d) K. Rogers and R. Diamond technique for studying socio-psychological adaptation “SPA” (in modification of A. K. Osnitskii); (e) T. Leary Interpersonal Diagnosis (in modification of L. N. Sobchik); (f) E. V. Kolomiychenko questionnaire “Your relation to sports” for students involved in sports; (g) and “Physical Self” and “Aesthetic Self” questionnaires.
 The participants comprised 109 (60 girls and 49 young men) students of sciences and humanities faculties of Southern Federal University aged 18–22 years, involved and not involved in sports.

Do infant sociomoral evaluation and action studies predict preschool social and behavioral adjustment?

Recent studies suggest that infants and toddlers evaluate others based on their prosocial and antisocial behaviors and engage in prosocial behaviors themselves. It is unknown to what extent infants’ responses in such studies reveal stable individual differences in social and/or moral competence that persist throughout development. The current study (N = 63) demonstrates that infants’ performance in sociomoral evaluation and action studies (mean age = 12 months) predicts social and behavioral adjustment at age 4 years. Specifically, a stronger preference for moral actions as an infant was associated with parent reports of fewer callous–unemotional traits, the domain most conceptually related to sociomoral evaluation and action, during preschool. Critically, preschool moral adjustment was uniquely associated with infants’ sociomoral responding and not with other more general aspects of infant functioning. When 2 children with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis were included in the sample, correlations between infant and preschool functioning were more widespread. Taken together, these results provide evidence for developmental continuity in the sociomoral domain and suggest that infants’ early behavioral tendencies may be building blocks for subsequent sociomoral development.

Feeling out a link between feeling and infant sociomoral evaluation.

Recent research has shown that infants selectively approach prosocial versus antisocial characters, suggesting that foundations of sociomoral development may be present early in life. Despite this, to date, the mental processes involved in infants' prosocial preferences are poorly understood. To explore a possible role of emotions in early social evaluations, the current studies examined whether four samples of infants and toddlers express different emotional reactions after observing prosocial (giving) versus antisocial (taking) events. Experimentally blind coders rated infants' and toddlers' emotional reactions to prosocial and antisocial interactions from video using a 1- to 7-point Likert scale of negative to positive emotion; reactions were rated as more positive after viewing prosocial compared to antisocial interactions in three of four samples. While the observed effects were small, a single-paper meta-analysis suggests that the findings are robust and stable across age. These results support the possibility that emotional reactions play some role in infants' sociomoral evaluations. Statement of contribution What is already known Infants prefer prosocial to antisocial individuals from the first year of life. Emotion plays some role in the sociomoral judgments of children and adults. What this study adds Infants and toddlers express more positive reactions after observing prosocial giving versus antisocial taking acts, though observed effect sizes are small. Naïve coders can predict at a better than chance rate what type of act an infant or toddler just viewed based on their facial expressions. Provides the first evidence that emotion plays some to-be-specified role in infants' and toddlers' sociomoral evaluations.

Preschoolers’ social and moral judgments of third-party helpers and hinderers align with infants’ social evaluations

Two experiments explored preschoolers’ social preferences and moral judgments of prosocial and antisocial others. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds (N=74) observed helping and hindering scenarios previously used to explore sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Whereas 3-year-olds in Experiment 1 did not reliably distinguish between the helper and hinderer when reporting social preferences or moral judgments, both 4- and 5-year-olds preferred the helper, judged the helper to be “nicer” than the hinderer, selectively allocated punishment to the hinderer, and were able to justify their punishment allocations. A simplified procedure and the addition of comprehension questions in Experiment 2 (N=24) improved 3-year-olds’ performance, suggestive that their performance in Experiment 1 was likely due to processing or memory difficulties rather than an inability to engage in explicit social and moral evaluation. These studies reveal that young children readily interpret helping and hindering scenarios as socially and morally relevant.

Infants’ preference for prosocial behaviors: A literature review

In 2007, a study carried out by Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom provided concrete evidence that infants as young as 6 months were capable of social evaluation, displaying an early preference for agents performing a prosocial behavior. Since then the development of early social abilities to judge other’s behavior has been the topic of a growing body of research. The present paper reviews studies conducted between 2007 and 2015 that experimentally examined infants’ social evaluation abilities by testing their preference for agents acting prosocially. We performed a detailed analysis of a corpus of 16 research studies including 59 experimental results, scrutinizing their methods and findings, and identifying their convergent and divergent features. This analysis showed that a preference for agents who perform prosocial behaviors (as opposed to antisocial or neutral) was present in a majority of infants, but some conflicting results have also been reported. The rich interpretation that infants are endowed with mature socio-moral evaluation abilities has not really been sufficiently discussed. In order to deepen this debate, we assessed other studies that have further explored infants’ understanding of the social value of behaviors. Many of the studies provide evidence that young infants manage to identify and prefer the prosocial agent by taking into account the context and agents' mental states beyond the behavior itself.In this study two specific areas are assessed: (1) studies that have previously explored social evaluation abilities beyond a basic preference for prosocial behavior and (2) current theories which attempt to explain how and why such preferences could exist so early in infancy. Future directions for research on social evaluation abilities in infants are also discussed as well as a review of the literature.

Explaining the U-Shaped Development of Intent-Based Moral Judgments.

When preschoolers evaluate actions and agents, they typically neglect agents’ intentions and focus on action outcomes instead. By contrast, intentions count much more than outcomes for older children and adults. This phenomenon has traditionally been seen as evidence of a developmental change in children’s concept of what is morally good and bad. However, a growing number of studies shows that infants are able to reason about agents’ intentions and take them into account in their spontaneous socio-moral evaluations. Here we argue that this puzzling U-shaped trajectory in children’s judgments is best accounted for by a model that posits developmental continuity in moral competence and emphasizes the effect of immature executive function skills on preschoolers’ performance.

Social Closeness and Decision Making: Moral, Attributive and Emotional Reactions to Third Party Transgressions

Decisions involving moral vectors are inherently social. This paper investigates social closeness to others as one of the important factors that mediate our evaluations of moral infractions. The influence of social closeness on participants’ third-party evaluations of moral transgressions was measured across development. Participants’ intentional attributions, punitive sentiments, moral judgments, and emotional reactions were measured using responses to hypothetical vignettes that describe socio-moral transgressions involving theft. Participants’ attribution judgments, punitive decisions, and emotional reactions differed when their social relationship with the perpetrator (Study One), and alternatively with the victim (Study Two), of the transgression was varied. Evidence is provided for the supposition that morality is a construct of social cooperative exchange and that social closeness influences socio-moral evaluations and judgments.