How Ownership Influences Children's Perceptions of Rights and Responsibilities to Environments: Study 2

Following from Study 1, this is our preregistration for Study 2 examining children's perceptions of the moral acceptability of engaging in either stewardship or exploitative behaviours towards environments, depending on ownership status of the actor (owner or non-owner). In Study 1, we found evidence that children are more likely to endorse doing helpful behaviours to unowned environments then they are to unowned objects. We also found that older children’s judgements were more heavily influenced by ownership status (owned vs not owned) than younger children. Following on from Study 1, we wish to examine whether increasing the explicitness and level of helpfulness/harm that occurs from the actors’ actions will reduce the influence of ownership status relative to action outcome (helpful or harmful). In Study 2, we will increase the level of harm/helping to be moderate (rather than mild), and make it more explicit by outwardly stating the impact of the action verbally, as well as depicting it visually.