Three-year-olds accept that we don’t keep our promises, if we have a good excuse. If one has an immoral excuse, for example selfish, they are less forgiving.
From the age of three, children already demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of morality. Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the scientific magazine Epsiloonbreaks down a preconceived idea about young children.
franceinfo: A team of American researchers is putting forward a somewhat surprising proposition: the children are in fact very understanding, they accept that we do not keep our word, they accept our apologies?
Mathilde Fontez: From three years old, yes! While we have in mind rather the big anger, the difficulty to accept the slightest frustration, the slightest annoyance at this age – it is the age of entry into kindergarten. And we wait for the 7 years, to make them listen to reason. But this experiment conducted at Duke University in the United States, on a cohort of 64 children, shows that, on the contrary, they are rather reasonable.
The researchers offered the children puppet shows where they had to react, precisely to the annoyance. A very simple little experiment: the puppets promised a toy, they broke their word – no toy – with more or less convincing justifications:
– No apologies.
– The good excuse: I had to help someone.
– The bad excuse: I wanted to watch TV.
And the children accept?
They accept yes, but only good excuses! They judge puppets who tell them they had to help someone much better than puppets who simply wanted to watch TV.
They accept prosocial excuses: those that are in accordance with the values that are recognized by all as being positive – generosity, mutual aid… And they are much less indulgent with excuses that are rejected by society: for example, selfishness. In short, at age 3, they already have a sophisticated understanding of morality.
Until then, we thought that these values were put in place later?
Overall yes. It was long believed that this key stage, moral development, happened slowly. But this study is not the first to kick in the anthill. Many specialists in early childhood had described a learning of the moral sense, much earlier in children.
And in recent years, experiments have multiplied in psychology to demonstrate this. For example, before this study on apologies, a team had already observed that 3-year-olds are able to finely judge others based on their intention, and not just their act. When you hurt someone, but you didn’t do it on purpose, it goes better. In short, all this social knowledge, children integrate it from the age of 3, and perhaps even before.