Young children think you can opt out of social-conventional but not moral practices

Preschoolers negatively evaluate conventional norm violations in pretend play

A growing body of research demonstrates that children's pretend play is largely influenced by their understanding of reality. The current work took a novel approach to testing children's understanding of pretense by investigating whether children apply and uphold their knowledge of conventional norms in pretend play. In this study, 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 200) were introduced to a series of pretend play scenarios (e.g., pretending to eat breakfast) in which a puppet pretended to follow a norm (e.g., pretended to eat cereal for breakfast) or violate a norm (e.g., pretended to eat a hamburger for breakfast). These pretend play scenarios were presented as either fantastical or realistic in nature. Consistent with our hypotheses, children evaluated pretend norm violation more negatively than pretend norm adherence and reported liking norm violators less than norm followers. Contrary to our hypothesis, the manipulation of play context (fantastical vs. realistic) did not affect children's evaluations. That is, children were just as negative about pretend norm violations (relative to pretend norm adherence) in fantastical pretend play scenarios as they were in realistic pretend play scenarios. Furthermore, individual differences in children's fantasy orientation did not predict their evaluations. This study is the first to establish that children maintain their real-world understanding of conventional norms in pretend play, providing further evidence that children's pretense is largely realistic in nature.

Young Children and Adults Show Differential Arousal to Moral and Conventional Transgressions

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.

A Developmental Perspective on the Origins of Morality in Infancy and Early Childhood

Key constituents of morality emerge during the first 4 years of life. Recent research with infants and toddlers holds a promise to explain the origins of human morality. This article takes a constructivist approach to the acquisition of morality, and makes three main proposals. First, research on moral development needs an explicit definition of morality. Definitions are crucial for scholarly communication and for settling empirical questions. Second, researchers would benefit from eschewing the dichotomy between innate and learned explanations of morality. Based on work on developmental biology, we propose that all developmental transitions involve both genetic and environmental factors. Third, attention is needed to developmental changes, alongside continuities, in the development of morality from infancy through childhood. Although infants and toddlers show behaviors that resemble the morally relevant behaviors of older children and adults, they do not judge acts as morally right or wrong until later in childhood. We illustrate these points by discussing the development of two phenomena central to morality: Orientations toward helping others and developing concepts of social equality. We assert that a constructivist approach will help to bridge research on infants and toddlers with research on moral developmental later in childhood and into adulthood.

Preschoolers, but not adults, treat instrumental norms as categorical imperatives

Hypothetical norms apply only when agents have specific goals, whereas categorical norms apply regardless of what agents want. Deciding whether a rule is hypothetical or categorical is crucial for navigating many social situations encountered by children and adults. The current research investigated whether preschoolers viewed instrumental norms (about how to accomplish practical tasks), prudential norms (pertaining to agent welfare), and moral norms (pertaining to others' welfare) as hypothetical or categorical. A second main question was whether preschoolers draw distinctions between instrumental and other norms. Participants were interviewed about norm violations in which the agent did or did not have the relevant goal. The goal manipulation had no effect on children's judgments of permissibility; most children treated all three norm types as categorical. Nevertheless, children distinguished instrumental events from prudential and moral events along several dimensions. In contrast, participants in two adult samples treated instrumental norms, and some prudential norms, as hypothetical, but treated moral norms as categorical (applicable regardless of agent goal). These findings suggest that preschoolers do not yet reliably distinguish between hypothetical and categorical norms, yet do view rules of instrumental rationality as a distinct type of norms.

An Actor's Knowledge and Intent Are More Important in Evaluating Moral Transgressions Than Conventional Transgressions

An actor's mental states-whether she acted knowingly and with bad intentions-typically play an important role in evaluating the extent to which an action is wrong and in determining appropriate levels of punishment. In four experiments, we find that this role for knowledge and intent is significantly weaker when evaluating transgressions of conventional rules as opposed to moral rules. We also find that this attenuated role for knowledge and intent is partly due to the fact that conventional rules are judged to be more arbitrary than moral rules; whereas moral transgressions are associated with actions that are intrinsically wrong (e.g., hitting another person), conventional transgressions are associated with actions that are only contingently wrong (e.g., wearing pajamas to school, which is only wrong if it violates a dress code that could have been otherwise). Finally, we find that it is the perpetrator's belief about the arbitrary or non-arbitrary basis of the rule-not the reality-that drives this differential effect of knowledge and intent across types of transgressions.