Preschoolers' moral actions and emotions in Prisoner's Dilemma.

The moral acts of 19 dyads of 4-year-olds in a cognitively simplified version of Prisoner's Dilemma were analyzed in relationship to their friendship, emotions, and processes of conflict resolution.Degree of friendship was rated by teachers; two sociologists used a Q-sort of Group Processes to describe the dyads' interactions; the emotions of each child were coded from videotape--independently of his or her partner's and with the sound turned off--in accordance with Ekman and Friesen's (1983) Emotion Facial Action Coding System.Moral acts were categorically identified as equalization, reparation, stalemate, default, and betrayal; these acts were also assigned scale scores on a dimension of moral sensitivity that was independently derived from separate work with a sample of 143 undergraduates.They judged the five acts in all possible paired comparisons and then rated the moral difference between each pair.These data almost perfectly fitted a model of increasing monotonic function according to Kruskal's (1964) criterion.The degree of friendship between the dyads and their interactive processes---group orientation, positive emotional tone, and active involvement--were positively related to sensitive moral action.Their emotions were related to concurrent acts, and more importantly, predicted their subsequent acts even though they seldom talked about morality.These results suggest that if social scientists' search for practical morality is to be successful, emotional communication needs to be brought into the account.A substantial and still growing number of investigations (for a few of the many examples, see Main & George, 1985;Rheingold & Hay, 1980, Strayer, 1980; and an extensive review by Radke-Yarrow, Zahn-Waxler, & Chapman, 1983) suggest that young children may be neither as morally insensitive nor incapable as held in theories that define morality and its development as primarily due to cognitive development or socialization.These contrary findings especially seem to occur in investigations that concern young children's moral actions rather than their judgments about hypothetical dilemmas.Still those cognitive scientists (for instance, Anderson, 1980) who have taken special care in simplifying and clarifying the cognitive requirements of their tasks also report such findings.Thus this growing body of work raises questions about the nature of young children's morality.Here we are concerned only with the conditions of their action, which is surely the more convincing test of moral capability.An obvious but not frequently studied feature of moral action is its heat--its "hot cognitions" in contrast to the cool cognitions evoked by hypothetical problems