Do young children accept responsibility for the negative actions of ingroup members?

Over, Harriet; Vaish, Amrisha; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.08.004

Cited by 21 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Another possibility is that children might have wanted to protect their ingroup from the potential negative consequences (e.g., punishment) of their whistleblowing and/or avoid being punished themselves. Previous work has shown that children feel responsible for their group members' negative actions (Over et al, 2016 ), and consequently children's feelings of shame or embarrassment about their group members' transgression might have decreased their whistleblowing in the ingroup severe condition. Relatedly, some children might have been shocked about their group's transgression and thus too preoccupied to speak out about it.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Whistleblower's Dilemma in Young Children: When Loyalty Trumps Other Moral Concerns

2018

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When a group engages in immoral behavior, group members face the whistleblower's dilemma: the conflict between remaining loyal to the group and standing up for other moral concerns. This study examines the developmental origins of this dilemma by investigating 5-year-olds' whistleblowing on their in- vs. outgroup members' moral transgression. Children (n = 96) watched puppets representing their ingroup vs. outgroup members commit either a mild or a severe transgression. After the mild transgression, children tattled on both groups equally often. After the severe transgression, however, they were significantly less likely to blow the whistle on their ingroup than on the outgroup. These results suggest that children have a strong tendency to act on their moral concerns, but can adjust their behavior according to their group's need: When much is at stake for the ingroup (i.e., after a severe moral transgression), children's behavior is more likely to be guided by loyalty.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Whistleblower's Dilemma in Young Children: When Loyalty Trumps Other Moral Concerns

2018

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“…Yet, this argument overlooks the possibility that at least some of children's beliefs about groups exist as part of a more abstract framework of how social groups function, beyond children's own experiences. For example, Tomasello reviews a great deal of work showing that preschool-aged children show preferential treatment for in-group over out-group members across a range of experimental paradigms (Fehr et al 2008;Misch et al 2014;Over 2018;Over et al 2016). These findings are not trivial and provide strong support for the suggestion that children's beliefs about obligation are embedded within their understanding of social groups.…”

Section: Intuitive Theories Inform Children's Beliefs About Intergroumentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Preschool children preferentially help in-group over out-group members (Over 2018). When a member of a 5-year-old's minimally established in-group does something mean to a victim, she feels an in-group responsibility to make amends to that victim – whereas she does not feel a responsibility if the perpetrator was an out-group member (Over et al 2016). When children in this age range are given a chance to share with children in their in-group, they do so relatively generously, whereas they do not do so with children from an out-group (Fehr et al 2008).…”

Section: A Shared Intentionality Accountmentioning

confidence: 99%

The moral psychology of obligation

2019

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Although psychologists have paid scant attention to the sense of obligation as a distinctly human motivation, moral philosophers have identified two of its key features: First, it has a peremptory, demanding force, with a kind of coercive quality, and second, it is often tied to agreement-like social interactions (e.g., promises) in which breaches prompt normative protest, on the one side, and apologies, excuses, justifications, and guilt on the other. Drawing on empirical research in comparative and developmental psychology, I provide here a psychological foundation for these unique features by showing that the human sense of obligation is intimately connected developmentally with the formation of a shared agent “we,” which not only directs collaborative efforts but also self-regulates them. Thus, children's sense of obligation is first evident inside, but not outside, of collaborative activities structured by joint agency with a partner, and it is later evident in attitudes toward in-group, but not out-group, members connected by collective agency. When you and I voluntarily place our fate in one another's hands in interdependent collaboration – scaled up to our lives together in an interdependent cultural group – this transforms the instrumental pressure that individuals feel when pursuing individual goals into the pressure that “we” put on me (who needs to preserve my cooperative identity in this “we”) to live up to our shared expectations: a we > me self-regulation. The human sense of obligation may therefore be seen as a kind of self-conscious motivation.

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“…For example, Bennett and colleagues (1998) found that when shown instances of unfamiliar ingroup members acting negatively, 7-year-olds, but not 5-yearolds, felt responsible for and embarrassed by these negative actions. Related research found that 5-year-old children already display subtler signs of guilt and responsibility after they observed their ingroup members break someone else's possession (Over, Vaish, & Tomasello, 2016). Furthermore, by age 5, children view themselves as particularly similar to children of the same gender if their gender identity has been made salient (Bennett & Sani, 2008a), and they recall words associated with their own groups (groups based on family, age, and gender) better than unrelated words, and to the same degree that they recall words associated with the self (Bennett & Sani, 2008b).…”

Section: How Social Categorization Influences Children's View Of Themselvesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social cognitive development: The intergroup context

Chalik¹,

Misch²,

Dunham³

2019

Preprint

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Throughout human history and across all human cultures, civilizations have organized themselves into social collectives, to the extent that it seems fair to say that social groups are the natural ecology of our species. In many ways, these groups play the same role as do categories in other domains; after all, the world is an incredibly complex place, and dividing it into categories is a powerful way to simplify this complexity and maximize efficiency in learning. In the social world, this way of working through complexity is especially important, given the extreme range of variability that exists across human individuals and communities. Children must navigate a world full of people with a range of properties that appear to have little in common with one another, posing a particularly difficult learnability problem. Social categorization allows children to work through this complexity by selecting features that denote meaningful differences between people. As a result, social categories become a fundamental lens through which we see the world.It should thus not surprise that social categorization of some sort exists across all human societies, making it a human universal (Brown, 2004). But, there are important differences across human cultures in how groups are defined, which groups are viewed as important, and what the consequences of group membership are. Thus, it is important to consider how cognitive development unfolds in an intergroup context. In this chapter, we broadly explore how children across development understand social categories and use these categories to navigate the social world. In doing so, we aim to demonstrate where there is diversity across human cultures in how social categorization unfolds, and what aspects of this diversity are grounded in common psychological tendencies and mechanisms.

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Do young children accept responsibility for the negative actions of ingroup members?

Cited by 21 publications

References 32 publications

The Whistleblower's Dilemma in Young Children: When Loyalty Trumps Other Moral Concerns

The Whistleblower's Dilemma in Young Children: When Loyalty Trumps Other Moral Concerns

The moral psychology of obligation

Social cognitive development: The intergroup context

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