Children's Normative Evaluations of Pro- and Anti-Autonomy Decisions

Autonomy is a basic psychological need, but are there circumstances under which people think it is morally okay to override someone's autonomy? To examine this question, this study investigated 4- to 9-year-old children's (n = 113) and adults' (n = 100) moral evaluations (e.g., 'right' and 'fair') of caregivers overriding a child's autonomy in situations which explicitly benefited (test condition) or did not benefit (baseline condition) the child. Across the two conditions, participants evaluated both the anti-autonomy (i.e., 'paternalistic' during the test condition) and the pro-autonomy decisions. We found that children evaluated the pro-autonomy decisions more positively than the anti-autonomy decisions in the baseline condition, whereas they produced the opposite pattern in the test condition. The adults' evaluations displayed parallel results. These findings suggest that when deciding whether personal autonomy should be overridden, children consider the welfare of the individuals involved, and they do so in a manner similar to their adult counterparts. These results have theoretical and practical implications for how to be paternalistic in a morally justified way.