The consideration of cost in evaluations of moral praiseworthiness among Chinese children

Abstract

Children recognise the praiseworthiness of others' moral actions from quite a young age. The work we propose here focuses on whether and how children's judgements of moral praiseworthiness may be affected by cost incurred by the agents. Recent work has revealed developmental changes in how children consider physical and psychological costs in their judgements of moral praiseworthiness. However, this question has only been examined among US children, and little is known about how much the findings can be generalised across cultures. In this article, we examine the consideration of different types of costs (psychological, physical) in moral evaluation by children in China, and compare to the US data. We choose to study children in China not only because it is a non-WEIRD culture, but also because recent work has suggested that there are cultural differences between the US and China in terms of how children conceptualise desire inhibition and self-control. This research will have implications for research on children's moral cognition across cultures.