The Effect Of Interpersonal Closeness On Children’s Omission Bias

Omission bias is a kind of special moral judgment,whieh is a cognitive tendency in moral judgment.And it means that in moral judgment,the bad result that coming from doing something is worse than that of inaction,which comes along with children,s perception of other people’ s intention.Previous studies have shown that interpersonal closeness can affect children’s moral judgment,but there is no study to explore the relationship of interpersonal closeness and the effect of omission bias in children’s moral judgment.Neither the relationship of them when considering object being injuried or not.In order to explore these problems,three experiments were designed.First of all,a total of 90 subjects in experiment 1,divided into three groups by grade,30 subjects in each group(Grade 1 Mage= 6.34,SD = 0.78;Grade2 Mage = 7.63,SD = 1.23;Grade3 Mage = 8.43,SD= 1.14),and we explored the influence of interpersonal closeness on the effect of omission bias of children’ moral judgment.Secondly,we further studied the effect of object being injuried or not and interpersonal closeness on effect of omission bias in children’s moral judgment,a total of another 90 subjects,also divided into three groups by grade,30 subjects in each group(Grade 1 Mage=6.30,SD = 0.89;Grade2 Mage = 7.57,SD=1.34;Grade3 Mage＝8.37,SD＝ 1.40).In both two experiments,the dual story method was used to let children to assign scores to the protagonist.The score of omission bias is used to indicate the effect of omission bias,and the score of omission bias is obtained by the degree of error in the doing situation minus the degree of error in the undoing situation.The result of experiment 1 showed that interpersonal closeness had a significant effect on children’s omission bias:the more intimate the relationship between the child and the host of the story is,the greater the omission bias is,and the more alienated is the relationship with the host of the story is,the weaker the omission bias is,and with the grade grows,children’s omission bias gradually weakened.The result of experiment 2 showed that in the victimized scenario,the more intimate the relationship between the child and the host of the story is,the greater the bias is;in the absence of the victim,the closer the relationship between the child and the host of the story is,the weaker the bias is,which means that object being injuried or not and the relationship between children and the hosts together affected children,s omission bias.In summary,our study can be concluded as follows:1.children’s omission bias decreases with grade increase;2.the influence of interpersonal closeness on children’s omission is significant;3.interpersonal closeness and whether or not there is a victim affect the omission of children’s omission.