Who will be nice and who will be nasty?: a cross-cultural investigation of children’s moral trait inferences
Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In this thesis, four studies were conducted to examine how children aged 4 to 8 years and adults from China and Australia made moral trait inferences of other people on the basis of their inconsistent past actions that were dependent on contexts and motives. Specifically, in studies 1 and 2, the protagonists behaved inconsistently towards different child recipients when no adults were present, either in a predominantly prosocial or antisocial way. Next, in study 3, the predominantly prosocial protagonists undertook their prosocial behaviours either in the presence of a female teacher or in her absence. Finally, in study 4, participants were explicitly told that the protagonists’ prosocial behaviours were arising from self-presentational motives in the presence of the teacher, and were arising from altruistic motives in her absence. After each story, participants were asked to make trait judgments (study 1 to 4), motive attributions (study 3), and behaviour predictions (study 1 to 4) of the protagonist. It was found that, first, children did not start to negatively evaluate protagonists whose prosocial behaviors arose from self-presentational motives until about 8 years of age, at which time they judged that protagonists whose prosocial behaviors arose from altruistic motives to be nicer. Young children, and especially the 4-year-olds, were insensitive to contextual cues betraying self-presentational motives, and they were also susceptible to a recency effect, such that their trait judgments were highly influenced by the outcome of the last behavior exemplar in the story vignettes. Second, Chinese children were more sensitive to contextual and motive information than Australian children. Eight-year-olds from China, but not Australia, were able to spontaneously infer a protagonist’s self-presentational motives and make negative evaluations of the protagonist when they observed that his/her prosocial behaviors were only manifest in the presence of an authority figure. These older Chinese children also expected more positive future behaviors from the altruistic protagonists than from the protagonists who had self-presentational motives, thus demonstrating a clear cultural difference in sensitivity to contextual and motive information when making moral trait inferences.
Author: Ming Yuan
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W135503651