Moral psychology

Nobes, G., Panagiotaki, G., & Martin, J.W. (2023). Moral luck and the roles of outcome and negligence in moral judgments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 106, 104456. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104456 

Nobes, G., & Martin, J. W. (2022). They should have known better: The roles of negligence and outcome in moral judgements of accidental actions. British Journal of Psychology, 113(2), 370-395. http://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12536  [Full text]

Nobes, G., Panagiotaki, G., & Engelhardt, P. (2017). The development of intention-based morality: The influence of intention salience and recency, negligence, and outcome on children's and adults' judgments. Developmental Psychology, 53, 1895-1911. doi: 10.1037/dev0000380

Nobes, G., Panagiotaki, G., & Bartholomew, K. (2016). The influence of intention, outcome and question-wording on children’s and adults’ moral judgments. Cognition, 157, 190-204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.08.019

Nobes, G., Panagiotaki, G., & Pawson, C. (2009). The influence of negligence, intention and outcome on children’s moral judgments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104, 382-397. DOI:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.08.001

Nobes, G., & Pawson, C. (2003). Children’s understanding of social rules and social status. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 49, 77-99. DOI: 10.1353/mpq.2003.0005

Nobes, G. (1999). Children's understanding of rules they invent themselves. Journal of Moral Education, 28, 215-232. DOI: 10.1080/030572499103232

Children’s use of intention and outcome information in their moral judgments

Nobes, G., Panagiotaki, G., & Pawson, C. (2009). The influence of negligence, intention and outcome on children’s moral judgments. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104, 382-397. DOI:10.1016/j.jecp.2009.08.001 

Piaget (1932) claimed that, unlike adults, children don’t use intention information (whether an action is deliberate or accidental) when judging actions. Instead, they are influenced only by the outcome – the degree of harm or damage caused. If Piaget is correct, children’s morality must be fundamentally different from adults’. It means that, before about 7 years of age, children can have little or no meaningful sense of right and wrong.

Piaget’s views have been tested in many studies, most of which were conducted during the 70s and 80s but also more recently  (e.g., Zelazo et al., 1996; Helwig et al., 2001). It is now clear that there were numerous problems with his methods, and that he underestimated children's understanding and use of intention information in their moral judgments. But these studies have tended to support his main claim that, in contrast to adults, children base their judgements more on outcomes than on intentions. However, in a recent study (Nobes et al., 2009), we found that even 3-4 year-olds can be remarkably adult-like in their use of intention information.

In this study, we introduced negligence as a third factor alongside intention and outcome. We told children stories in which characters' intentions, and the outcomes of their actions, were varied systematically in the usual way. In addition, each character was either careful or careless (Fig. 1). We found that, like adults, young children considered careless actors to be blameworthy and punishable even when their actions were well-intentioned. Moreover, when the characters were careful, children's judgments were based much more on intentions than on outcomes.

Figure 1. Example of a story used in Nobes et al., (2009). A boy helps his mother to lay the table (positive intention); he carries the cups carelessly (negative); and all the cups are broken (negative outcome). By varying all three factors we found that, like adults, most young children judged such actions to be blameworthy not because the outcome was bad, but because the boy was negligent. Moreover, when the actor was careful, actions were judged more according to intention than to outcome.

A particularly surprising finding was that younger children often assumed that characters were negligent even when they were told explicitly that they were not. That is, whenever the outcome of an accident was bad, many children said that the characters were responsible because they should have been even more careful. 

The finding that children's judgments are particularly sensitive to negligence information could explain why previous researchers have reported that children apparently focus on outcomes rather than intentions. In our view, children judge even well-intentioned accidents to be blameworthy because they assume that the characters must have been negligent. It therefore seems as though children judge according to outcome (they judge actions with bad consequences to be blameworthy), but in fact their judgments are based on assumed negligence (the agent is naughty because they were careless) rather than on the outcome per se.

If this negligence account is correct, then young children's moral judgments are very similar to adults'. They base their judgments primarily on intention, and relatively little (perhaps not at all) on outcome. Moreover, like adults, they are strongly influenced by negligence.

Our study needs replicating and building on to discover exactly why children seem to be able to use intention in some situations, but not others. Our aims are to conduct partial replications of previous studies to see whether their findings can be explained by children's tendency to assume negligence when an outcome is bad, and to investigate why some children are better at using intention information (i.e., make more adult-like moral judgments) than others. For example, the ability to use intention information might be related to parenting, peer relationships, antisocial behaviour and theory of mind. 

BPS Research Digest - Children's moral understanding