The influence of intention, outcome and question-wording on children’s and adults’ moral judgments

Nobes, Gavin; Panagiotaki, Georgia; Bartholomew, Kimberley J.

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.08.019

Cited by 54 publications

(128 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…That is, regardless of age, almost all participants made outcome-based acceptability judgements, and children (the oldest were nearly 8) made primarily outcome-based punishment judgments. Nobes, Panagiotaki and Bartholomew (2016) replicated Helwig et al's and Zelazo et al's methods and corroborated their findings. However, when the wording of the acceptability question was changed from the original (e.g., "Is it okay for Kevin to give Rob a puppy?")…”

supporting

confidence: 80%

“…Two of the youngest children withdrew early. Nobes et al (2016) indicated effect sizes of action valence (accidental or attempted harm) when the rephrased acceptability question was asked (as in the present study) of p 2 = .452 for acceptability (naughtiness) judgments, and p 2 = .185 for punishment judgments. An a priori power analysis using GPower (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007), with effect size specification as in Cohen (1988), indicated that a sample of 40 participants (i.e., 10 per age group) would be sufficient to detect the smaller effect (for punishment) with power (1 -β) set at 0.80 and α = .05.…”

Section: Samplementioning

confidence: 56%

“…The first prediction was that, as in Nobes et al (2016) and Experiment 1, acceptability and punishment judgments would be primarily intention-based. Second, we predicted that, as in Experiment 1, even 4-5 year olds' judgments would be based more on intention than outcome.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…These referred to aspects of the stories that were unrelated to intentions, causes or outcomes and instead asked whether the dax To summarize, the only relevant change from Nobes et al, (2016) was that the confirmation questions about cause and intention were added. As in Nobes et al, the acceptability question was rephrased so that it focused on the agent rather than the outcome, and character information was removed.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This experiment built on Experiment 1 to investigate whether the outcome-based judgments reported there and in Nobes et al (2016) resulted from assumptions -particularly by young children -that accidental harms were caused by negligence. If so, despite their being well-intentioned, these actions would be considered blameworthy and punishable.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

The development of intention-based morality: The influence of intention salience and recency, negligence, and outcome on children’s and adults’ judgments.

Nobes

Panagiotaki

Engelhardt

2017

Developmental Psychology

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Two experiments were conducted to investigate the influences on 4-8-year olds' and adults' moral judgments. In both, participants were told stories from previous studies that had indicated that children's judgments are largely outcome-based. Building on recent research in which one change to these studies' methods resulted in substantially more intention-based judgment, in Experiment 1 (N = 75) the salience and recency of intention information were increased, and in Experiment 2 (N = 99) carefulness information (i.e., the absence of negligence) was also added. In both experiments even the youngest children's judgments were primarily intention-based, and in Experiment 2 punishment judgments were similar to adults' from 5-6 years. Comparisons of data across studies and experiments indicated that both changes increased the proportion of intention-based punishment judgments -but not acceptability judgments -across age-groups. These findings challenge and help to explain those of much previous research, according to which children's judgments are primarily outcome-based. However, younger participants continued to judge according to outcome more than older participants. This might indicate that young children are more influenced by outcomes than are adults, but other possible explanations are discussed.

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supporting

confidence: 80%

Section: Samplementioning

confidence: 56%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The development of intention-based morality: The influence of intention salience and recency, negligence, and outcome on children’s and adults’ judgments.

Nobes

Panagiotaki

Engelhardt

2017

Developmental Psychology

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Dual-Process Theories, Cognitive Decoupling and the Outcome-to-Intent Shift: A Developmental Perspective on Evolutionary Ethics

Ingram

Moreno-Romero

2021

Synthese Library

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Dual-process theories, cognitive decoupling and the outcome-to-intent shift: A developmental perspective on evolutionary ethicsAbstract/Introduction A central tenet of evolutionary ethics is that as a result of evolutionary processes, humans tend to respond in certain ways to particular moral problems. Various authors (particularly those associated with "dual-process" theories of reasoning) have posited conflicts between "fast", automatic, evolved impulses and more controlled judgements that may be more flexible and respond to culturally determined. In this chapter we argue that the evolutionary sources of automatic moral judgements are quite diverse, and include some intuitive processes (specifically, reading other people's intentions) that are quite sophisticated from a social-cognitive point of view. We further argue that processes of controlled, reflective moral reasoning represent the activity of higher-level process that arbitrate between conflicting inputs from diverse automatic heuristics, in response to normative concerns. The integration and subjugation of automatic responses to more reflective ones is a developmental process that develops at varying rates in different people and in different cultural contexts. To make this argument, we first consider how approaches that represent cognition in terms of two types of processesincluding but not limited to the automatic/reflective distinctioncan be rendered more sophisticated by a consideration of evolutionary developmental psychology.We then apply this more developmentally aware approach to an extended example of the phenomenon in children's moral development known as the outcome/intent shift. We finish by outlining a model that shows how automatic and controlled processes may be integrated in children's social learning in culturally variable ways. An Evolutionary-Developmental Perspective on Dual-Process Theories of CognitionMost evolutionarily inspired approaches to psychology, including moral psychology, view adult cognitive functioning as designed by evolution to solve adult adaptive problems.An example is the moral foundations theory of Haidt and colleagues (Graham et al., 2013), which sees moral cognition as responding to different kinds of triggers, each with relevance for differing aspects of fitness, including care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation (see Suhler & Churchland, 2011, for an extended critique). All these themes are couched in terms of the decisions that adult

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The Influence of Intentional and Accidental Moral Transgressions on Children’s Understanding of Verbal Irony

Hukker,

Sprenger,

Hendriks

2024

Studying Verbal Irony and Sarcasm

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The influence of intention, outcome and question-wording on children’s and adults’ moral judgments

Cited by 54 publications

References 43 publications

The development of intention-based morality: The influence of intention salience and recency, negligence, and outcome on children’s and adults’ judgments.

The development of intention-based morality: The influence of intention salience and recency, negligence, and outcome on children’s and adults’ judgments.

Dual-Process Theories, Cognitive Decoupling and the Outcome-to-Intent Shift: A Developmental Perspective on Evolutionary Ethics

The Influence of Intentional and Accidental Moral Transgressions on Children’s Understanding of Verbal Irony

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