| Popis: |
Commitments create obligations, but the precise scope of commitments can never fully be made explicit. For instance, we expect someone to be released from her commitment anytime this conflicts with a weightier moral consideration (Shpall, 2014). Previous research has shown that 3-year-old children not only have an understanding of the obligations entailed by commitments (Gräfenhain et al., 2009; Hamann et al., 2012), they also distinguish between instances in which a partner fails to make a contribution intentionally and instances in which she fails to do so for external reasons or out of incompetence (Kachel et al., 2018). But are children at that age also able to assess the legitimacy of reasons why agents may intentionally refrain from acting in accordance with commitments? To probe this, we manipulate the kind of reason that leads a partner to break a commitment. In the main task, three-year-old children play a game with a puppet in order to obtain rewards. In two different conditions, the game is interrupted by the partner either because (a) the partner has been allured to play another tempting game; or (b) the partner consoles another agent in distress. We predict that three-year-old children differentiate between these two cases, protesting normatively against defection and being less willing to wait when the joint activity is interrupted because of another temping game. |
