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

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.