PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland
Postdoctoral Researcher in Morality and Social Psychology, The University of Queensland ,
For The Conversation
Although adults’ sense of morality has previously been mapped, until now we have known little about what children care about, or how this might change as they age.
Our team of researchers from the University of Queensland recently examined the growth of moral concern (caring about the well-being of another) in children, and found children become more inclusive in who and what they care about as they age.
We asked 151 children – aged four to ten years – to map out how much they cared about a range of 24 things. These things included various humans, animals and inanimate objects. Our participants placed each one across three “moral circles”, indicating whom or what they cared about a lot, a little, or not at all.
We discovered children included more targets in their moral circles as they aged. Their ability to extend concern to others improves with development, much like numeracy and literacy skills do. This suggests the penny drops at multiple points through a child’s moral development as their understanding of the moral needs of others becomes more nuanced.
We are born social: from an early age children are driven to share with, help and be liked by others. Helping behaviours can occur as early as 18 months of age, and become commonplace by age three. But these behaviours generally only occur in situations where helping doesn’t come at a direct cost (for example, giving up something you value such as a cherished toy).
In contrast, although a four-year-old recognises sharing is a good thing to do, and they punish others who do not share, they find it extremely difficult to do themselves. We found four-year-olds were the least likely to donate stickers they earned in our task to an unknown peer.
It’s only at the later stages at seven to eight years old that children begin to engage in altruistic sharing behaviours. At this age, children are becoming much more receptive to societal norms of fairness and justice. They will show aversion not only to unfair scenarios where they receive less than another child, but also when they receive more than another child.
This ability to incorporate the experience of others into our own decision making is the crux of moral reasoning. It’s this ability that might also explain why older children reported caring significantly more about vulnerable members of society – such as the sick and people with disabilities.
While four-year-olds cared just as little about a sick person as a shoe, from seven years of age children were reporting caring a lot about a sick person, placing them in their inner circle. Older children (so, age seven and above) also appear more capable of caring for more abstract concepts, such as the environment.
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