Rutgers University New Brunswick, 152 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854, United States.
Rutgers University New Brunswick, 152 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854, United States.
Conscious Cogn. 2018 Aug;63:183-197. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2018.05.007. Epub 2018 Jun 1.
Do choices about which moral actions to take cohere with subsequent judgments of their outcomes? The first set of experiments (N = 60 preschoolers and 30 adults) directly compared whether moral choices and judgments reflect distinct considerations, and whether coherence varies based on the valence of the moral scenario. Participants' responses suggested that moral principles may be applied differently for moral choices and judgments, and that harm-based situations are particularly demanding for children. To determine whether children's difficulty with harm-based situations reflects demand characteristics, a second set of experiments presented forty-three preschoolers and thirty-nine adults with a moral dilemma wherein they could choose to omit an action and maximize harm or act to minimize harm. Both age groups acted to minimize harm when caused indirectly. These results suggest that making choices about harm are not unilaterally demanding for preschoolers, but they struggle to make choices that minimize harm in a forced-choice scenario.
人们在做出道德行为选择时所考虑的因素，与他们对这些行为后果的判断是否一致？在第一组实验中（参与者包括 60 名学龄前儿童和 30 名成年人），我们直接比较了道德选择和判断是否反映了不同的考虑因素，以及一致性是否会因道德情境的好坏而有所不同。参与者的反应表明，道德原则可能会因道德选择和判断而有所不同，而基于伤害的情境对儿童来说特别具有挑战性。为了确定儿童在基于伤害的情境中遇到的困难是否反映了需求特征，我们进行了第二项实验，实验对象包括 43 名学龄前儿童和 39 名成年人，他们面临一个道德困境，可以选择省略一个行为并使伤害最大化，或者采取行动使伤害最小化。两个年龄组在间接造成伤害时都选择了将伤害最小化。这些结果表明，对于学龄前儿童来说，做出有关伤害的选择并不是单方面的要求，但是他们在强制性选择情境中难以做出将伤害最小化的选择。
