How U.S. And Chinese children talk about personal, moral and conventional choices

There is agreement among children across cultures that matters of personal preference can be freely chosen, while moral actions are obligatory. Children's beliefs about actions that violate norms and conventions are more culturally variable. This study explores children's reasoning about personal (toy preference), moral (sharing vs stealing), and conventional (artifact use) choices among five- to seven-year-olds (N = 62; M = 6.39, SD = 0.75) in the U.S. and China by asking them to tell stories to accompany pictures showing a character prior to making decision and two possible post-decision outcomes for each domain. We found cultural similarities in children's stories about personal and moral issues: children in both cultures emphasized desires (“wanting” and “liking”) when talking about toy preferences and combined an emphasis on evaluations and desires when talking about sharing or stealing. We found cultural differences in children's storytelling about artifact conventions: U.S. children's stories about this conventional choice contained more mental state language, while Chinese children's stories contained more evaluative language. We compared children's stories to simple forced-choice judgments of possibility and permissibility, and discussed how together they paint a richer picture of emerging cultural differences in choice construal.