Children’s enforcement of justice in third-party moral transgressions : examining norm-enforcing behaviours towards puppet versus human transgressors

• Main Author: Ng, Heather Chen Ying
• Other Authors: Setoh Pei Pei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: DRNTU::Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/77067
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

According to past research, children who witness transgressions will enforce justice by protesting and tattling on the transgressors, even if they were not personally involved (Rossano, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2011). In addition, children also formed moral and social judgements which favoured prosocial over antisocial others (Vondervoort & Hamlin, 2017). However, majority of prior research on children’s moral reasoning was conducted through puppets which may limit generalisability to real life interactions with humans. Research has yet to examine the extent to which children’s moral reasoning behaviours towards puppets may persist in their interactions with humans. Therefore, the present study examined and compared children’s tattling behaviours, along with moral and social judgements in live interactions with human versus puppet agents. Preschoolers aged five to six years old (N = 120) were randomly assigned to either the Actress condition (n= 60) or the Puppet condition (n= 60). They witnessed a moral transgression where a naughty agent disobeyed instructions, damaged the experimenter’s property, and falsely blamed a nice agent. Results found that children reliably chose to enforce justice through tattling and favoured the Nice agent over the Naughty agent in their moral and social judgements. However, they tend to enforce justice to a greater extent towards puppet transgressors as compared to human transgressors. These findings suggest social cost as an explanation for the difference in children’s norm- enforcing behaviours towards puppet and human transgressions and propose implications for the moral education curriculum in Singapore. Keywords: moral reasoning, moral transgression, social cost