Heroes, villains, and everything in between: Children’s assessment of morally ambiguous characters

Abstract

Most research on the development of moral judgments has focused on children’s assessment of all-good or all-bad characters with little attention to the gray areas of morality. Yet real people’s behavior is often morally ambiguous, involving sometimes moral and sometimes immoral actions. In this study, we examined how 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old U.S. children (N = 72; 51% female) evaluate and respond to morally ambiguous characters. Children heard stories that each contained a purely moral character, a purely immoral character, and a morally ambiguous character. The 6- and 8-year-olds were more likely than the 4-year-olds to distinguish the ambiguous character from the moral and immoral characters. These age-related changes elucidate the development of children’s assessments of the “gray areas” of morality.