Cross-cultural moral judgments and emotions in preschoolers: human and robot transgressions in Japan and Italy

F. Manzi, G. Peretti, C. Di Dio, S. Itakura, T. Kanda, H. Ishiguro, M. Gummerum, D. Massaro and A. Marchetti

Behaviour and Information Technology, 2025, vol. 44, issue 14, 3484-3500

Abstract: The study aims to investigate the effect of cultural background between Italy and Japan on 5-year-old children’s moral judgements and emotion attributions towards human and robot. The children watched videos drawn from classic ‘happy victimizer’ stories, in which the transgressors were either a child or a robot, violating rules against stealing or not sharing. We assessed the children’s attribution of emotions both to the transgressors and to themselves as victimisers (i.e. first-person perspective), as well as the moral judgement of the violations. The results showed that children from both cultures do not significantly discriminate between human and robot in their moral judgement and emotion attributions. Concerning moral emotions, Italian children tend to attribute fewer negative emotions to the transgressor than Japanese children, especially in the not sharing scenario. Furthermore, adopting a first-person perspective to evaluate moral transgressions reduces cultural differences in emotion attributions. The study highlights how culture, rather than the transgressor’s agency (human or robot), influences early moral reasoning.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0144929X.2025.2477779 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tbitxx:v:44:y:2025:i:14:p:3484-3500

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tbit20

DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2025.2477779

Access Statistics for this article

Behaviour and Information Technology is currently edited by Dr Panos P Markopoulos

More articles in Behaviour and Information Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().