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Unfortunately it would not let me upload my video, but I have submitted it on Schoology under the assignment with the directions for the introduction video.

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This article introduced two case studies of young men who were both well educated. Suddenly, they were experiencing extreme depression, so doctors began to look into their cases. It later became evident that age was playing a huge role in the sudden depressive stay (late adolescence/early adulthood); however, that was not all. Both patients scored extremely high on the State of Shame and Guilt Scale. This led researchers to believe that it is not only age, but also Moral Incongruence, that is causing depression. This is what allowed me to make the connection between moral pressures and the effects they have on an individual. If people feel as though their actions do not match what they were taught morally, it can lead to severe mental health issues, depression being one of them.

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A Case Study of Depression in High Achieving Students Associated With Moral Incongruence, Spiritual Distress, and Feelings of Guilt

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Psychosocial and cultural factors play an important, but often neglected, role in depression in young individuals. In this article, we present two cases of young, educated males with major depressive disorder and prominent themes of guilt and spiritual distress.

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Lois Lowry explores the concept of moral pressures in The Giver. Jonas, the eleven year old protagonist is living in an utopia, and fighting all urges to conform. In the society he is living in, everybody is against memories from the outside world, in fact, they have no prior knowledge about any world other than their own. Due to this, Jonas is conflicted, and he does not know what to do with the information he was given. I was able to draw the connection between moral pressures and how they can affect one individual through the way that Jonas was acting. Jonas was not able to use the memories to their full potential because of societal pressures.

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"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost provides for many different interpretations. When I first read this poem, I did not instantly make the connection to my driving question. However, the more familiar I became with it, the stronger message it sent. "The Road Not Taken" touches on the idea of pressures and regret. Frost was conveying that life provides so many opportunities for us, and we might feel pressured to do the same thing as the person ahead of us. This is mainly because we do not know what to expect. The same thing goes for morals, although we feel obligated to follow the rules, there might be benefits in not. People around us will more often than not judge our decision to not follow the rules, but it is better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission.

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The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost | Poetry Foundation

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This is an oil painting that is a part of The Reflections Collection by Mark M Mellon. The painting portrays the concept of good and evil. When making decisions, we are  tempted to veer off from the choice that is considered morally acceptable, and that is why I made this connection. Moral expectations around the world differ, and the stricter these expectations are, the more tempted we feel to be different. We do not only make these choices to be different, but also when we see short-term benefits. The selfishness behind decisions like this do not benefit society as a whole, and that is why it is considered evil. With this painting being light on one side and dark on the other, we can see that it is depicting how humanity is constantly making the decision between good and evil.

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This section of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, titled, “Does children’s moral compass waver under social pressure,” examines moral expectations on children. Author Elizabeth Kim forms critical questions about child development and works to answer them with her research team. The overarching question of this entire paper is, do “children change their judgments when faced with social pressure to conform to atypical judgments about moral and social norms?”. Over the course of various experiments, researchers have concluded that children do have a tendency to conform to social pressures, but they are researching further to examine if age and domain have any additional influence. I began to make the connection back to my driving question by pondering across the idea of children conforming, and wondering if this had anything to do with their surrounding society. The less accepting society is to new ideas and different personalities, the more children feel the need to conform.

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Abstract

The current study tested whether preschoolers' moral and social-conventional judgments change under social pressure using Asch's conformity paradigm. A sample of 132 preschoolers ( M age = 3.83 years, SD = 0.85) rated the acceptability of moral and social-conventional events and also completed a visual judgment task (i.e., comparing line length) both independently and after having viewed two peers who consistently made immoral, unconventional, or visually inaccurate judgments. Results showed evidence of conformity on all three tasks, but conformity was stronger on the social-conventional task than on the moral and visual tasks. Older children were less susceptible to pressure for social conformity for the moral and visual tasks but not for the conventional task.

Introduction

A large body of research guided by social domain theory (Smetana, 2006, Smetana et al., 2014, Turiel, 1983, Turiel, 1998, Turiel, 2006) has shown that children understand distinctions between moral issues (related to others' welfare, fairness, and rights) and social conventions (shared social norms in various social contexts). For example, by age 4, children consistently view moral transgressions as wrong, whereas social-conventional transgressions are interpreted as wrong only if rules or authority figures say so (Smetana and Braeges, 1990, Smetana et al., 2012). According to this theoretical framework, moral judgments are prescriptive and pertain to how people ought to relate to each other; they are not relative to or defined by the social context (Turiel, 1983). Although evidence of children's early understanding of moral prescriptions is robust, much less is known about whether children hold on to the prescriptive view when making judgments about moral and social-conventional issues in situations involving social pressure.

Children's judgments about different types of normative behavior may be more or less resistant to group pressure. If moral judgments are prescriptive and unalterable (Smetana, 2006, Smetana et al., 2012, Turiel, 1983, Turiel, 2002, Turiel, 2006), a judgment about hitting a classmate may be less easily influenced by group consensus than a judgment about a social norm such as not putting a toy back in its designated place. Past studies have not experimentally examined whether children's prescriptions of moral and social-conventional issues can be distinguished by the degree to which they are influenced by peer group judgment. In other words, it is not known whether children change their judgments when faced with social pressure to conform to atypical judgments about moral and social norms and whether change in judgments varies by domain and age. Addressing these questions will expand our understanding of young children's rule alterability and how peers influence normative judgments in young children.

Asch's (1956) classic conformity paradigm provides one way of testing the prescriptiveness of morality. This paradigm has been modified recently for research with young children. For example, using a modified Asch line length task with preschool children, Corriveau and Harris (2010) found that children as young as 3 and 4 years were susceptible to social pressure by adult confederates when making simple line length judgments. Consistent with this finding, 3- and 4-year-olds also showed higher conformist tendencies when making line length judgments in public settings than when their responses were unobserved (Corriveau, Kim, Song, & Harris, 2013). Similarly, preschoolers have demonstrated susceptibility to peer group consensus in animal size visual judgment based on pictures, indicating that peers also serve as a key social reference group as early as 4 years (Haun & Tomasello, 2011).

Young children have also been found to demonstrate conformity in the domain of conventional information and action. For example, when unfamiliar images are labeled in a way that conflicts with children's prior knowledge of conventional names or information, 3- and 4-year-olds tend to accept claims made by others (Bernard et al., 2015, Jaswal, 2004). Similarly, when categorizing objects by their labels, children also tend to conform (Bernard et al., 2015, Corriveau et al., 2009, Fusaro and Harris, 2008). In terms of object function, Haun, Rekers, and Tomasello (2012) found that even 2-year-olds preferred to follow a group majority's (three individuals) action to open a box rather than a single informant's action (repeated three times), suggesting that young children are more likely to follow majority behavior. More recently, Seston and Kelemen (2014) also found that 3-year olds conformed to group consensus when endorsing statements about novel objects' functions. Moreover, 3- to 5-year-olds' preferences for copying an inefficient action of either a single model or a group were shown to differ by culture, with Chinese Americans showing stronger preferences to imitate the group than Caucasian Americans (DiYanni, Corriveau, Kurkul, Nasrini, & Nini, 2015).

In sum, various studies have demonstrated that children show socially motivated agreement with the unanimous majority against their own initial judgment. This phenomenon has been labeled as "strong conformity" by Haun and Tomasello (2011). So far, little research has used a modified Asch conformity paradigm to examine the effects of social pressure on moral and social-conventional judgments. We know of only two related studies, both with adult participants. Kundu and Cummins (2013) asked two groups of participants to verbally rate the permissibility of 12 moral dilemmas on a 7-point scale. The dilemmas included two categories: typically "permissible" judgments (e.g., pushing a switch of a trolley to cause the death of one person vs. five people) and typically "impermissible" judgments (e.g., killing one's oldest son to appease the leader of a clan on whose land one trespassed) (Greene, Morelli, Lowenberg, Nystrom, & Cohen, 2008). The control group ( n = 17) rated the dilemmas in the presence of the experimenter only, whereas the experimental group ( n = 16) did the ratings in the presence of three male confederates who provided extreme responses (i.e., either 6 and 7 or 1 and 2) that were contrary to social norms. Although the sample size was small, the results showed significant group differences, suggesting that an Asch-like paradigm is useful in studying moral conformity.

More in line with social domain theory, Lisciandra, Postma-Nilsenová, and Colombo (2013) conducted a within-participants experiment with adults using 30 scenarios (10 each for moral, social, and decency violations). To obtain baseline data, participants were first asked to individually fill out a 40-item online questionnaire (30 short scenarios and 10 distractors) on a 7-point scale of approval from strongly disapprove to strongly approve. Two weeks later, participants were told that their online responses were lost due to server error and needed to be recollected. Participants were then assigned to one of two conditions. In the high social presence condition, an experimenter read aloud the scenarios from the same questionnaire (order reversed) and asked participants to indicate their responses verbally in the presence of three confederates; participants were always the second to last to respond. In the low social presence condition, participants were asked to select their answers on the computer screen in the same room as confederates (whose faces could not be seen but whose responses were shown on participants' computer screen simultaneously with the scenarios). For both conditions, confederates always provided responses that were two points above the mean of participants' baseline responses and in the opposite direction from the normative answer. Also relevant to the current study, Lisciandra and colleagues reported significant differences in total conformity between the high social presence and baseline conditions but not between the low social presence and baseline conditions. They also found that in the high social presence condition participants conformed significantly more to social violation scenarios than to moral violations, with decency violations in between. No significant domain effect was found in the low social presence condition.

Given that the preschool years are an important time for moral development, extending these findings to young children has both theoretical and practical implications. Exploring moral choices and their alterability during early childhood using a social conformity paradigm may help us to understand whether moral prescriptions hold despite peer influence. Knowing under what conditions young children alter their normative reasoning may help to shed light on how they deal with social conflicts (e.g., group vs. moral concerns) in peer group contexts.

Age is likely to be an important factor in conformity. With increasing age, children have more confidence in their own grasp of reality and consequently show lower rates of conformity to others. For example, one study found that children's capacity to make autonomous decisions and ignore incorrect suggestions made by others on visually unambiguous tasks increased from 3 to 17 years of age (Walker & Andrade, 1996). Corriveau and colleagues (2013) found significant age-related decreases in conformity even among preschoolers. Corriveau and Harris (2010) found a similar trend, although their results did not reach statistical significance, perhaps due to the small sample size. Given that children are also developing their understanding of morality and social conventions at these ages, children may feel more confident in their judgments about these issues as they get older and, thus, may be less susceptible to peers' opinions and peer pressure regarding these issues.

The current study addressed two questions about young children's early conforming behaviors. First, do children alter their prescriptive judgments regarding moral issues and descriptive judgments regarding social-conventional issues when faced with social pressure and, if so, how do judgments in these two domains compare with each other and with visual judgments? We hypothesized that because social conventions are defined as contextually relative and arbitrary, children would be more susceptible to social pressure and their conformity would be greater for social-conventional issues than for moral issues. A comparison with visual judgments should provide information regarding children's prescriptive views of moral issues. In other words, if the level of conformity on a moral judgment task is similar to or lower than that for visual judgments, it would suggest that children recognize the prescriptive nature of morality. The second research question concerns age differences in conformity in different domains. We hypothesized that conformity would be negatively associated with age across all domains, but especially in the moral domain. This hypothesis was based on existing evidence for age-related decreases in conformity and age-related development in moral prescriptivity (Smetana, 1981, Smetana, 2006, Smetana et al., 2012).

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 132 American preschool children ( M age = 3.83 years, SD = 0.85, range = 2.77-6.25; 67 girls) from preschools and day-care centers in southern California of the southwestern United States. Background information on children's ethnicity was provided by parental report with the help of teachers. In total, 47 children were identified as Caucasian American, 46 as Asian American, 13 as Hispanic, 12 as mixed ethnicity, 5 as African American, 4 as Middle Eastern, and 4 as "other" (1 child's

Results

Children's conformity scores were calculated based on their responses after the conformity manipulation (i.e., viewing a given video) as compared with their responses during the pretest. If they failed to choose the "tallest" line in the visual judgment task or said that it was "okay" to do a given moral or social-conventional transgression during the pretest, the conformity paradigm did not apply to them for the given transgression (i.e., leaving no room for conformity). Those trials were

Discussion

Past research has shown that children understand that moral issues (pertaining to others' welfare, fairness, and rights) are not dependent on personal opinion or social norms. This has been shown to be distinct from more arbitrary, contextually relative social conventions (Nucci, 2001, Smetana, 2006, Smetana et al., 2014, Turiel, 1983, Turiel, 2006). The current study provided a novel test of preschoolers' understanding by comparing their conformity to group consensus across moral,

Acknowledgments

The authors give special thanks to Emily Pi, Jenan Husain, Poelene Silla, Elaine Huang, Judy Lee, and Jessica Park for their help with data collection, entry, and coding. In addition, the authors thank the models who contributed their time and acting skills to be part of the videos.

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Does children's moral compass waver under social pressure? Using the conformity paradigm to test preschoolers' moral and social-conventional judgments

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The current study tested whether preschoolers' moral and social-conventional judgments change under social pressure using Asch's conformity paradigm. A sample of 132 preschoolers ( M age = 3.83 years, SD = 0.85) rated the acceptability of moral and social-conventional events and also completed a visual judgment task (i.e., comparing line length) both independently and after having viewed two peers who consistently made immoral, unconventional, or visually inaccurate judgments.

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Lord of the Flies takes place on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. This setting plays an essential role in our understanding of the story. Knowing that there is a group of little boys alone on a deserted island, we are aware that they have no way of communicating with the mainland, no prepared resources, and no knowledge of their surroundings. With this information, it is evident to the audience that these boys are not influenced by society, and have to make decisions based of their prior moral understanding.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3bNdVy9_1U

William Golding was a British novelist (1911-1993) who wrote what some would consider one of the most influential texts of the 50s. It is still being taught in schools around the world, and arising critical questions that shape societal conflict. Lord of the Flies sparked these debates intentionally, as Golding spent years observing and analyzing children. As a young boy Golding considered himself to be on the outskirts of social interaction, so he took it upon himself to watch how kids in the neighborhood interacted. Later becoming a school teacher, Golding would put kids in observed situations, making them fight against each other, or count every word in a book, all to see how they would react. These observations are what led to the interactions we see in Lord of the Flies. The book is so influential because these relationships came from real situations.