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. 2020 Jul-Sep:55:100908.
doi: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2020.100908. Epub 2020 Jun 9.

Young Children's Judgments and Reasoning about Prosocial Acts: Impermissible, Suberogatory, Obligatory, or Supererogatory?

Audun Dahl  1 , Rebekkah L Gross  1 , Catherine Siefert  1
Affiliations

Young Children's Judgments and Reasoning about Prosocial Acts: Impermissible, Suberogatory, Obligatory, or Supererogatory?

Audun Dahl et al. Cogn Dev. 2020 Jul-Sep.

Abstract

In deciding when to help, individuals reason about whether prosocial acts are impermissible, suberogatory, obligatory, or supererogatory. This research examined judgments and reasoning about prosocial actions at three to five years of age, when explicit moral judgments and reasoning are emerging. Three-to five-year-olds (N = 52) were interviewed about prosocial actions that varied in costs/benefits to agents/recipients, agent-recipient relationship, and recipient goal valence. Children were also interviewed about their own prosocial acts. Adults (N = 56) were interviewed for comparison. Children commonly judged prosocial actions as obligatory. Overall, children were more likely than adults to say that agents should help. Children's judgments and reasoning reflected concerns with welfare as well as agent and recipient intent. The findings indicate that 3-to 5-year-olds make distinct moral judgments about prosocial actions, and that judgments and reasoning about prosocial acts subsequently undergo major developments.

Keywords: judgments; moral development; preschoolers; prosocial acts; reasoning.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Graphical representation of intersection among prosocial acts and acts judged as supererogatory, obligatory, suberogatory, or impermissible. The subset of actions that are prosocial are expected to intersect with the subsets of actions that are deemed supererogatory (i.e., okay to refrain, should do), obligatory (wrong to refrain, should do), suberogatory (okay to do, should refrain), and impermissible (wrong to do, should refrain) by most or all people.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Children’s and adults’ judgments about helping. The bars show proportions of participants indicating that helping was impermissible, suberogatory, obligatory, or supererogatory. (The same data are represented in Table S1.) The horizontal line separates judgments that the agent should help from judgments that the agent should not help. The horizontal axis indicates proportions of all participants responding to a given situation. Pairwise comparisons for propensities to say that the agent should help: *p <.01, **p <.001
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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