General Discussion on Effects of Outcome

As shown in the previous tables, there were significant differences between the subjects‘ promise judgments before and after being informed of the outcome in all the experimental groups. In comparison, the control group performed similarly on the two conditions. In the ―post-outcome‖ stage, the differences between positive and negative conditions were found that the subjects tended to recognize a promise with a positive outcome as an effective promise. However, when the promise was not fulfilled, most subjects failed to recognize it as an actual promise, implying that the participants were affected highly by the outcome while making promise judgments.

In general, the pattern of the children‘s development of promise comprehension in this study followed the pattern found in the previous research that the younger children fail to recognize a broken promise as an effective promise, and that they are more likely than the older children to base their justification on the outcome of the promise (Astington, 1988a; Maas and Abbeduto, 2001). In effect, children are still naïve that due to their limited cognitive ability, they can only recognize a promise when the promise content accords with the outcome; that is to say, in the eyes of a child, a promise is defined as a promise only when it yields a positive outcome. When

refer to the outcome than the other two groups of subjects, a finding which was consistent with the previous research. They erroneously concerned the fulfilled outcome as a part of a promise while the adults tended to treat the outcome as a separate issue, as the following quote from an adult (G5S3²) illustrates in (3):

(3) Ta yijing daying le. Youmeiyou zuo shi lingwai yi hui 3SG already promise PT whether do COP another one CL shi.

issue

‗He already made a promise. Whether he does it or not is a separate issue.‘ (G5S3, Q6)

Although the promise judgments of the control group still exhibited a significant difference between positive and negative outcomes, our adults tended to recognize a broken promise as an actual promise because the promiser expressed the target

‗He didn‘t make a promise, because he didn‘t do it.‘ (G1S2, Q6)

(5) Yinwei ta wancheng le daying laoshi de shi.

because 3SG finish PT promise teacher GEN thing

‗(It is a promise,) Because he finished what he promised to do for the teacher.‘

(G2S2, Q5)

As shown in (4) and (5), most children‘s understanding of promise was inevitably affected by the outcome of promise, while the adults‘ concepts of promise were not as in (3). Generally speaking, children were more likely to judge a promise from the promisee‘s point of view, suchthat the promise had to be fulfilled to make it

2 G5 = Group 5 (control group); S3 = Subject No. 3

a promise. The adults, on the other hand, tended to make judgments from the promiser‘s perspective in that they considered the promise to have been made once the utterances are expressed. The preferences demonstrated by children for positive outcomes in determining an effective promise also imply that Searle‘s (1969) four conditions are not of equal value with regard to children. Our younger children placed more emphasis on the essential condition (i.e., the obligation to carry out a future act) than the propositional content condition (i.e., the utterance used by the promiser to make a commitment). On the other hand, more than half of the adult participants viewed the propositional content condition as being more important than the essential condition of a promise.

In Piaget‘s (1896–1980) theory of cognitive development³, children begin to use concrete object operations to think logically during the Concrete Operational Stage, defined as sometime between the age of seven and eleven. The tasks they can operate are more physically rather than mentally because they are inadequate for logical mental operation. During this time, children are only capable of using concrete ideas or experiences to solve problems. After growing out of this stage, children move on sometime between the age of eleven and sixteen to the Formal Operational Stage, in which they move beyond concrete experiences, begin to learn how to think abstractly, and draw logical inferences and reasoning to solve problems (Inhelder and

3 Piaget‘s theory of cognitive development was proved influential in many different education-related areas such as developmental psychology and morality development. In the theory, he proposed four major periods of cognitive development:

1) Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2, when infants rely on behavioral schemes (movement and five senses) to adapt to the environment. During this stage, children are extremely egocentric, meaning they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints.

2) Preoperational stage: lasting from about ages 2 to 7, when children are thinking at a symbolic level but are not yet using cognitive operations, which is considered as an internal mental activity that one performs on logical thinking. Egocentrism begins strongly and then weakens.

3) Concrete operational stage: lasting from about ages 7 to 11, when children begin to think more logically but only with tangible objects and experiences. They are very concrete in their thinking with practical aids and no longer egocentric.

4) Formal operational stage: from age 11 to16 and beyond, when individual begins to think more rationally and systematically about abstract reasoning and hypothetical events. In this stage,

Piaget, 1958; Piaget, 1974). These two stages are formed in an invariant developmental sequence (Flavell, 1963; Piaget, 1969, 1970); that is, every individual will progress through these cognitive developmental stages in exactly the same order, with the former stage being a prerequisite for the latter stage, though some may move on to the next stage earlier than others due to their personal backgrounds or cultural influences. There can be no skipping of the various stages of cognitive development, because each successive stage is built upon the previous stage and represents a more complicated way of thinking. Children do not move on from the Concrete Operational Stage to the Formal Operational Stage until they are around eleven years old. In the present study, the outcomes of the promises were concrete actions which could be readily confirmed by all participants, rather than promising content (i.e., utterances), which are abstract in nature and are not immediately verifiable. Therefore, they were more likely to refer to the concrete outcomes rather than the abstract utterances when making promise judgments.

However, according to Piaget‘s (1932, 1965) theory of moral development, children have little respect for social rules during the Premoral Period (i.e., children younger than five). As they grow older—to between the age of five and ten, which is known as the stage of Heteronomous Morality—they observe social rules and mores followed by powerful authority figures, such as their parents, as sacred and unalterable. At this stage, children think of rules as moral absolutes and believe that breaking them will cause expiatory punishment. By the age of ten or eleven, the stage of Autonomous Morality sets in; this is when children start to realize that social rules are negotiable and changeable according to human needs. Children at this stage are able to revise rules and make new ones according to one‘s personal experiences in new circumstances (Peters, 1981). This theory can explain the preference of our 6- to 9-year-old children for positive outcomes when making promise judgment. It is the

children‘s lacks of flexibility which caused them to form a product-oriented concept of promise, whereas adults were more flexible and sophisticated so as to tolerate the conflict between the promise content and its outcome. Children perceive a promise as something for which one is obligated to accomplish a future act while upholding a commitment. This rule is sacred and unalterable in the mind of the child; therefore, an unfulfilled promise is not considered to be a promise.

In this study, the promise judgments of the control group showed significant differences between promise judgments with a positive outcome and a negative outcome (0.99 vs. 0.61, p = .001), indicating that some of the adult participants were also affected by the outcomes. This result seemed to go against the moral development aspect of Piaget‘s theory since that our adult aged 25 should be able to make promise judgments regardless of whether the outcome was positive or negative.

However, by refining and extending Piaget‘s theory of moral development, Kohlberg (1963, 1984; Colby and Kohlberg, 1987) came to believe that the correlation between universal sequences of moral growth and age is not absolute. He claimed that both cognitive development and relevant social experiences are the foundation for the development of moral reasoning.