How Preschoolers Judge Anthropogenic Harm

One promising avenue for improving early-childhood environmental education is to consider how children develop moral judgments about human behaviors that impact the environment. Over time, research and practice have consistently documented that school-aged children view the environment as having moral standing; that is, they consistently interpret behavior that harms the environment as morally wrong. It is less clear, however, how young children morally judge behaviors that harm the environment.

To address that question, researchers conducted two parallel empirical studies on moral reasoning with 3- to 5-year-old children: In the first, they showed 24 children between the ages of 3 and 5 simple drawings of a child doing one of three types of actions (12 total drawings, with 4 per category). The three types of actions were: harm to the environment, such as throwing a candy wrapper out of the car; harm to another person, such as pushing another child; and non-harmful personal choices, such as eating carrots for a snack. Researchers then asked the participating child to sort each picture into one of three categories of increasing severity, indicated by the images for each category: “a smiley face” (indicating “OK” behaviors), a “slight frowny face,” and an “exaggerated frowny face.”

Children in all three age groups (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) predominantly selected the non-harmful personal choice actions as the least negative of the three, confirming they were likely distinguishing the actions based on moral harm. Additionally, the study uncovered an important age-based difference: the 3-year-old children did not differentiate between the harming environment and harming person actions, but the 4- and 5-year-old children did. They consistently ranked harming person as much more negative than harming environment, while still ranking harming environment as worse than nonharmful personal choice.

These results suggest that children's sensitivity to actions that harm people increases around 4 years, whereas environmental actions that do not have a clear “victim” do not. One implication of this is the importance of indicating clear and identifiable agents that suffer harm (environmental or personal) when discussing consequences of actions with young children. The researchers present these results as compelling evidence that connecting environmentally harmful behaviors to moral judgments is an ability that develops early in 15 young children and precedes socialization by formal education. In other words, children as young as 3 and not yet in school are indeed sensitive to behaviors that harm the environment.

In the second study, researchers asked 30 children to conduct the same sorting activity as in the first study. However, before doing so, they asked the children to complete a “perspective-taking task.” Researchers read the children a picture-book story and then asked the children to put themselves in the shoes of one of two groups of characters from the story: either the characters who undertook some kind of environmentally harmful behavior, or the characters who suffered as a result of such behavior. The second study's results showed that completing the perspective-taking task did not change responses for the harming person or nonharmful personal choice categories, but did change children's responses to the environmental harm category. Children who took the perspective of the environmental harm perpetrator later judged environmentally harmful actions less harshly, while children who took the sufferer's perspective later judged such actions more harshly. These results, while preliminary, suggest that empathizing with characters who either cause or suffer from environmental harms influences young children's moral judgments of actions directed toward the environment.