Moral psychology
Can training children to hold back their gut reaction change moral judgment?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Young children judged accidental harm more like adults only after a short training that told them to hold back their automatic reaction to the victim's suffering, not after training that simply told them to focus on intentions.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Pre-test / training / post-test design: children judged cartoon protagonists in coincidence, accidental-harm and aggression scenarios, were randomly assigned to one of three short metacognitive trainings (control, mentalising, mentalising plus inhibitory alerts), then repeated the same judgments; adults did the pre-test as a developmental benchmark
- N
- N=72 · 102 children took part; 30 were excluded (one outside the age range, 29 who did not pass the training comprehension check), leaving 72 children, 24 per training group. 16 adults completed the pre-test only.
- Population
- French-speaking children aged 5 to 8 recruited at a Paris science museum, plus young adult volunteers
- Outcome
- Contrastive indexes of how much moral and social judgments distinguished protagonists by causal role (accident vs coincidence) and by intention (aggression vs accident)
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Key findings
Before training, children were sensitive to both intentions and causal role but, unlike adults, did not give intentions priority; adults weighted intentions more than causal role. Only the group whose training included inhibitory alerts changed: their intention-based distinctions increased after training (a contrast-by-time interaction with partial eta squared of 0.50), and their post-training pattern no longer differed significantly from adults. The control and mentalising-only groups did not change, and the adult-child difference persisted in those groups.
Methodology
Children aged 5 to 8 watched short wordless cartoons in which one character hit another on purpose, by accident, or not at all (the victim fell by coincidence), and answered questions such as who was the bad guy and who they would play with. They were then randomly given one of three brief trainings about a story in which a boy accidentally injured a friend with a ball: a control version that just mentioned two possible answers, a mentalising version stressing the boy's intentions, or a mentalising version plus executive alerts warning them not to respond automatically to the fact that someone got hurt. They then repeated the same cartoon judgments, and adults did the cartoons once for comparison.
Limitations
Each training group had only 24 children, and nearly a third of recruits were excluded for failing the training check (mostly in the two instruction-heavy groups), which could bias who remained. Effects were measured immediately after training on the same kind of accident scenario, so the study shows neither lasting change nor transfer to other moral situations. Some key follow-up effects were marginal, the absence of a child-adult difference after training is a null result rather than proof of equivalence, and the training may have worked by helping children sustain theory-of-mind reasoning rather than by inhibiting an emotional reaction.
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