Groups as moral boundaries: A developmental perspective

Chalik, Lisa; Rhodes, Marjorie

doi:10.1016/bs.acdb.2020.01.003

Cited by 25 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 112 publications

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“…Such results are consistent with other research finding that young children do make distinctions when considering prosocial obligations outside of social relationships. For example, White children consider other White children more obligated to help a racial in-group than an out-group, and this does not change with age (Weller et al, 2013; see also Chalik & Rhodes, 2020; Pun et al, 2021). Young children also care about whether someone has the capacity to help; children will evaluate someone who is able to help (but does not) more harshly relative to someone who is not able to help (and does not; Jara-Ettinger et al, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations.

Marshall¹,

Gollwitzer²,

Mermin-Bunnell³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Do children, like most adults, believe that only kin and close others are obligated to help one another? In two studies (total N = 1140), we examined whether children (~5-to ~10-yos) and adults across five different societies consider social relationship when ascribing prosocial obligations. Contrary to the view that such discriminations are a natural default in human reasoning, younger children in the United States (Studies 1 and 2) and across cultures (Study 2) generally judged everyone-parents, friends, and strangers-as obligated to help someone-inneed. Older children and adults, on the other hand, tended to exhibit more discriminant judgments. They considered parents more obligated to help than friends followed by strangers-though this effect was stronger in some cultures than others. Our findings suggest that children's initial sense of prosocial obligation in social-relational contexts starts out broad and generally becomes more selective over the course of development.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations.

Marshall¹,

Gollwitzer²,

Mermin-Bunnell³

et al. 2022

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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show abstract

“…A total of 176 children, ages 4 to 8 years, participated in Study 1. We chose this age range because prior work on ingroup and outgroup biases used a similar age range (Chalik & Rhodes, 2020;Mandalaywala, 2020). Of the initial 176 children, 6 children were excluded because of interference from siblings, and 1 was excluded because of experimenter error (the experimenter went off script), leaving 170 children in the sample.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intuitive Sociology: Children recognize decision-making structures and prefer groups with less concentrated power

Thomas

Mitchelle²,

Terrizzi³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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From an early age, children recognize that people belong to social groups. However, not all groups are structured in the same way. The current study asked whether children recognize and distinguish among different decision-making structures. If so, do they prefer some decision-making structures over others? In two studies, 6-to-8-year-old children in the United States distinguished between two decision-making patterns, but 4- and 5-year-old children did not. In these studies, children were told stories about two groups that went camping. In the hierarchical group, one character made all the decisions; in the egalitarian group, each group member made one decision. Without being given explicit information about the group’s structures, 6 to 8-year-old children recognized that the two groups had different decision-making structures and the children preferred to interact with the group where decision making was shared. Crucially, children also inferred that a new member of the egalitarian group would be more generous than a new member of the hierarchical group. Thus, from an early age, children’s social reasoning includes the ability to compare social structures, which may be foundational for later complex political and moral reasoning.

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“…This "adopted utility" concept of affiliation makes unique predictions about the ways in which infants will reason about affiliation, when compared to accounts of early affiliative understanding that focus on social group membership or interpersonal similarity Rhodes, 2013;Liberman, et al, 2017a;Ting, et al, 2019;Chalik & Rhodes, 2020). At its simplest, the adopted utility concept of affiliation proposed here encodes relationships in an asymmetrical manner, as the weight Individual A places on Individual B's rewards, without entailing any probability that Individual B will value Individual A's rewards.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation

Lj¹

2021

Preprint

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To successfully navigate their social world, humans need to understand and map enduring relationships between people: we need a concept of social affiliation. Here I propose that our initial concept of social affiliation, available to human infants, is based on the extent to which one individual consistently takes on the goals and needs of another. This proposal grounds affiliation in a commonsense psychology that treats individuals as rational actors, as formalized in the naive utility calculus model. A concept of affiliation based on interpersonal utility adoption can account for findings from studies of infants’ reasoning about imitation and similarity, helpful and fair individuals, “ritual” behaviors, and social groups, without the need for additional innate mechanisms such as a coalitional psychology, moral sense, or general social preference for similar others. This concept of affiliation also offers a new view on the prosocial nature of imitation, placing the value of aligning with someone else’s behavior in the adoption of their goals rather than in mere similarity. I propose further tests of this concept of affiliation, and also discuss how it is likely to be relevant to reasoning and learning about social relationships across the lifespan.

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Groups as moral boundaries: A developmental perspective

Cited by 25 publications

References 112 publications

How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations.

How development and culture shape intuitions about prosocial obligations.

Intuitive Sociology: Children recognize decision-making structures and prefer groups with less concentrated power

Adopted utility calculus: Origins of a concept of social affiliation

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