Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Boston College.
Emory University School of Medicine.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2024 Sep;153(9):2216-2229. doi: 10.1037/xge0001617.
Third-party intervention is a cornerstone of cooperative societies, yet we know little about how children develop an understanding of this social behavior. The present work generates a cross-cultural and developmental picture of how 6-, 9-, and 12-year-olds ( = 447) across four societies (India, Germany, Uganda, and the United States) reason about third-party intervention. To do so, we measured children's obligation judgments and unstructured descriptions of third-party intervention. Although some cultural differences emerged, 6-year-olds largely considered bystanders as obligated to respond to wrongdoing, regardless of the bystander's social position. In contrast, 9- and 12-year-olds were more likely to exclusively ascribe this social responsibility to people in positions of authority. Despite these age differences, children of all ages generated role-specific descriptions of third-party intervention, with authority figures intervening in distinct ways from peers. For authority figures, children in India and Uganda described third-party intervention as involving corporal punishment or unspecified punishment, whereas children in the United States described such intervention as involving only verbal intervention (i.e., telling someone to stop). For peers, children in all societies described third-party intervention as involving reporting misdeeds to an authority. Collectively, these data show that early conceptualizations of third-party intervention are rooted in shared notions of obligation yet are also subject to cultural and contextual influences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
第三方干预是合作社会的基石，但我们对儿童如何理解这种社会行为知之甚少。本研究通过四个社会（印度、德国、乌干达和美国）的 6 岁、9 岁和 12 岁儿童（=447 名）的跨文化和发展研究，生成了儿童如何推理第三方干预的图片。为此，我们测量了儿童的义务判断和对第三方干预的非结构化描述。尽管出现了一些文化差异，但 6 岁儿童在很大程度上认为旁观者有责任对不当行为做出反应，而不管旁观者的社会地位如何。相比之下，9 岁和 12 岁的儿童更倾向于将这种社会责任仅归因于权威人士。尽管存在这些年龄差异，但所有年龄段的儿童都对第三方干预产生了特定角色的描述，权威人士的干预方式与同龄人明显不同。对于权威人士，印度和乌干达的儿童将第三方干预描述为涉及体罚或未具体说明的惩罚，而美国的儿童则将此类干预描述为仅涉及言语干预（即告诉某人停止）。对于同龄人，所有社会的儿童都将第三方干预描述为向权威人士报告不当行为。总的来说，这些数据表明，第三方干预的早期概念化根植于共同的义务观念，但也受到文化和背景的影响。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2024 APA，保留所有权利）。
