Psychological Development and Education ›› 2023, Vol. 39 ›› Issue (2): 173-183.doi: 10.16187/j.cnki.issn1001-4918.2023.02.03

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The Moral Obligation of Helping Each Other within Social Groups at Children Aged 7~9

HE Xiaoyan1,4, HUA Rui1, DUAN Jipeng3, LUO Runfeng2, YIN Jun1   

  1. 1. Center of Group Behavior and Social Psychological Service, Department of Psychology, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211;
    2. School of Teacher Education, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing 312000;
    3. School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062;
    4. School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875
  • Published:2023-03-11

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Abstract: The social groups play a vital role in organizing our social experiences. It has been suggestedthe foundational role of social groups is to mark people as intrinsically obligated to one another (i.e., moral obligation). About this moral obligation, previous studies mainly focused on the interactive behavior with negative effects (i.e., harming), while the social interaction could be also positive (i.e., helping). Hence, the current study was aimed to explore whether children aged 7~9 years old would view people as morally obligated to help persons belonging to their own group. To examine the belief of moral obligation toward group members, we examined judgments about whether the wrongness of violations of obligations depends on the presence of explicit rules. Using this method, when children maintain that an action (e.g., do not help someone or harm someone) is unacceptable, even if there are no explicit rules in the agent’s environment prohibiting the action (e.g., no rules against unhelping), it suggests that they view the action as an intrinsically moral obligation. As to the current settings, comparing with between-group unhelping condition, if children still believe that the harming or unhelping behavior within within-group members is more unacceptable when explicit rules do not exist, it would indicate that children hold the corresponding moral obligation for ingroup members. The results found that: (1) The difference of rated scores of acceptability between whether the explicit rule information was present or not in the between-group unhelping condition was significantly higher than that in the within-group unhelping condition; (2) Teenagers aged 13~15 years old also showed the same evaluation differences about unhelping behaviors between within-group and between-group conditions, as 7~9 years old children reported. The above results indicate that the explicit rule has a greater impact on the acceptability about mutually unhelping behaviors when two interactive persons are from the same social group than when two interactive persons are from the different social groups. Hence, children aged 7~9 years old view social groups as marking patterns of intrinsic moral obligations that the ingroup members should help each other, and this belief maintains across ages (at least 13~15-years old).

Key words: social classification, social group, mutual help, moral obligation

CLC Number: 

  • B844
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