Harm, Affect, and the Moral/Conventional Distinction

TLDR

The moral/conventional task is widely used to study moral understanding in children and clinical populations, with prior studies indicating that harmful transgressions elicit a signature pattern of serious, generalizable judgments that is thought to be pan‑cultural and early‑developing, though most evidence comes from schoolyard scenarios. We conducted an online study using a broader set of harm transgressions beyond typical schoolyard examples. The broader harm transgressions failed to elicit the expected signature pattern, providing preliminary grounds for skepticism about earlier conclusions from the moral/conventional task.

Abstract

Abstract: The moral/conventional task has been widely used to study the emergence of moral understanding in children and to explore the deficits in moral understanding in clinical populations. Previous studies have indicated that moral transgressions, particularly those in which a victim is harmed, evoke a signature pattern of responses in the moral/conventional task: they are judged to be serious, generalizable and not authority dependent. Moreover, this signature pattern is held to be pan‐cultural and to emerge early in development. However, almost all the evidence for these claims comes from studies using harmful transgressions of the sort that primary school children might commit in the schoolyard. In a study conducted on the Internet, we used a much wider range of harm transgressions, and found that they do not evoke the signature pattern of responses found in studies using only schoolyard transgressions. Paralleling other recent work, our study provides preliminary grounds for skepticism regarding many conclusions drawn from earlier research using the moral/conventional task.