If you had to save the life of a person or an animal, which would you choose? Most adults say they would save the person, but almost half of young children would prefer to save the animal instead, according to a study in Poland.
鈥淭he finding really surprised us,鈥� says at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, one of the researchers involved.
The majority of adults view human lives as being more precious than those of animals. For example, a survey of millions of people in 233 countries, mostly aged in their 20s and 30s, found they largely agreed that self-driving cars should crash into dogs or cats instead of people if they had to choose.
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However, growing evidence suggests that many young children feel differently. Using a toy railway and Lego figurines, Wilks and her colleagues presented 170 children aged 6 to 9 in an urban part of Poland with scenarios based on the classic trolley problem. The children had to decide whether to direct a runaway rail car down one of two tracks so that it crashed into a Lego person or a Lego animal 鈥� either a dog or chimpanzee. For comparison, the researchers repeated this with 178 Polish adults aged 18 to 50.
About 42 per cent of the children said they would save the dog and make the rail car collide with the person instead, compared with just 17 per cent of adults. About 28 per cent of children also prioritised the chimpanzee over the person, compared with 11 per cent of adults.
Similarly, Wilks and her colleagues previously found that 28 per cent of children aged 5 to 9 in urban areas of New England in the US said they if they had to rescue one from a sinking ship, compared with 8 per cent of adults. About 18 per cent of children in that study also said they would save a pig over a person, compared with 3 per cent of adults.
鈥淐hildren learn from their parents, teachers and others that it鈥檚 really important to care for others, but it may be easier for them to learn this as a blanket rule that applies to both humans and animals,鈥� says at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. As a result, they don鈥檛 show a strong preference for saving one over the other, she says.
鈥淗owever, as they get older, they might pick up on cultural narratives that tell us it鈥檚 really important to care for other people, especially those in need, but don鈥檛 tend to focus as much on caring for animals,鈥� says Neldner.
Her research suggests this shift starts to take place by the age of 10. For example, when she asked Australian children aged 4 to 10 to order pictures of people, animals, plants and objects according to how much they cared about them, the 4-year-olds tended to care more about dogs, cats and dolphins than about their classmates, police officers and sick people, but this was reversed in the 10-year-olds.
The reason children seem to value dogs so highly, more so than chimpanzees and pigs, is probably due to their familiarity, says Wilks. Her studies found that children who spent more time with dogs were more likely to say they would save a dog over a person.
Future studies should investigate whether children from other cultures also value animals more than adults do and whether they value different types of animals, she says.
PsyArXiv
