Temporality in Moral Self-judgment in Children

Abstract

Children’s moral judgments have been first talked about combined with the time perspective. In this study, 97 children from kindergarten, grade one and grade two was assigned to the future group or the past group, participated in the interview protocol and rated their moral judgment scores toward 4 moral and 4 immoral scenarios happened in the past week or the next. Children’s perception of what degree of reward or punishment they would receive, their emotion reactions, as well as their reputational concern were recorded for the future analysis. The study was designed to figure out whether children would attribute future good deeds and bad deeds more moral components compared to the past like adults does (Sjåstad & Baumeister, 2018), and whether subjective temporal distance played a mediating role in this cognitive process. The results confirmed the hypothesis that grade one children did attribute higher moral scores to future incident compared to the past, while in grade two group the effect was reversed. We also found children at that age generally attribute higher emotion scores to reward scenarios compared to punishment scenarios.