Children’s judgments of and reasoning about people with disabilities who produce norm violations

• Published in: Journal of experimental child psychology Vol. 215; p. 105318
• Main Authors: Granata, Nicolette, Wiebe, Megan, Lane, Jonathan D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Elsevier Inc 01.03.2022
• Subjects: Child, Preschool; Disability concepts; Disability judgments; Disabled Persons; Humans; Intuition; Judgment; Moral evaluations; Moral reasoning; Morals; Problem Solving; Social cognition; Theory of mind; Theory of mind; Moral reasoning; Disability judgments; Disability concepts; Moral evaluations; Social cognition
• ISSN: 0022-0965; 1096-0457
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105318

•People with disabilities are often judged for non-normative behavior they can’t control.•Children 4.5 years and older accounted for the role of disability in persons’ non-normative behavior.•Children as young as 4 years of age mentioned physical or auditory limitations in their reasoning for the non-normative behavior of people with disabilities.•Children are aware of and capable of learning about disability concepts in the preschool years. People with disabilities may behave in non-normative ways because they cannot act otherwise. This study explored whether U.S. children aged 3.00 to 8.99 years (N = 105) differ in their evaluations of people who commit norm violations when those persons have perceptual or physical disabilities. Across 12 scenarios, children were asked to explain different characters’ non-normative behaviors and to evaluate each character’s naughtiness. Characters were typically developing, had a physical disability, or had a hearing disability. Disabilities were described to participants but were not visually depicted. Across moral and conventional norm violations, children aged 4.5 years and older judged characters with disabilities as less naughty than characters without disabilities, whereas younger children (3 and 4 years) judged all characters as equally naughty. Children’s explanations for characters’ non-normative behaviors (acknowledging characters’ physical/auditory limitations and inferring negative attributes) significantly predicted their naughtiness judgments; this was true for participants across the sampled age range. Thus, preschool children demonstrated flexibility in their moral judgments across a variety of everyday behavioral violations, tempering their negative evaluations of persons who committed non-normative behaviors when those persons had unseen disabilities that could reasonably account for their actions. Parents and teachers may be able to build on these early moral intuitions to foster greater acceptance of persons with disabilities.