دانلود رایگان مقاله بررسی پذیرش مسئولیت برای اعمال منفی اعضای گروه فرزندان جوان

Abstract

This study investigated whether young children accept responsibility for the negative actions of ingroup members. Five-year-old children watched a transgressor break someone else’s valued possession. Depending on condition, this transgressor either belonged to the same group as the child or a different group from the child. Coding of children’s nonverbal behaviour indicated that they displayed more signs of guilt (but not other negative emotions) when the transgressor belonged to their own group than the other group. Furthermore, when the transgressor belonged to their own group, children were more likely to say that their own group should apologise for the damage and that they themselves should try to repair the broken object. Children’s connections to their groups are thus so profound that they appear to feel responsible for the negative actions of their group members even when they had no personal involvement in the harm those actions caused.

4. Discussion

This experiment was designed to investigate whether five-year-old children accept responsibility for the negative actions oftheir ingroup members. Results from the coding of children’s nonverbal behaviour suggestthatthey displayed significantly more signs of guilt when a member of their own group had committed a transgression than when a member of the other group had committed a transgression. These negative emotional displays appear to be specific to guilt. Children did not differ in their displays of fear, suggesting that the differences between conditions on the other measures cannot be explained by fear of negative consequences for their own group. Nor can they be explained by sadness at the ingroup’s transgression, because displays of sadness did not differ between the conditions. Finally, displays of embarrassment were similar in the two conditions, further underlining that the manipulation specifically affected guilt rather than other negative social emotions.