Abstract
This paper addresses recent research on children's concept of personal identity and its relation to moral traits and interpersonal relationships. It is inspired by earlier studies showing that there is a strong connection between the folk concept of personal identity and preference for moral traits with interpersonal connotations (the "essential moral self" hypothesis of Strohminger & Nichols, 2014, 2015).
Strohminger, Knobe and Newman (2017) suggest that the "true self" of a person is generally viewed to be moral and inherently good. Also Tobia (2015, 2016) found that most respondents have higher tendency to agree that personal identity was broken after negative moral change than after positive moral change.
These and other findings suggest that there is a connection between personal identity and positive interpersonal dispositions of a person in question. In order to explore these concepts also in developmental context we conducted an interview study in 2017 on Czech children and teenagers (N=217; 56,4% female; age range 6-15; average age=11).
Respondents were randomly recruited at a public family event. Interviewer introduced each participant to a scenario in which a person ("your friend" (N=90), "someone you know" (N=36) or "some person" (N=91)) undergoes various changes after being closed in a special sci-fi chamber.
Changes encompassed 6 categories: physical (appearance), cognitive (intelligence), moral (love for others, treatment of others), in character (laziness), in memory (remembering life experiences) and in perception (vision). Both negative and positive versions of the changes were included.
Respondents were asked to judge how much each of the changes would affect the person's identity core on a 7-point scale (0-they are still the same person; 6-they are not the same person anymore). Data analyses showed that respondents consider moral traits to be significantly more important for personal identity preservation than any other category of traits.
The next most important category is memory, followed by cognition, character and perception. Physical category remains far behind all the other categories.
The expected difference between the impact of negative and positive versions of the changes was also supported by the data. The most salient difference came up in rating of the change in treatment of other people (becomes cruel vs. becomes nicer to other people).
Also memory loss was rated considerably higher than the corresponding super-memory gain. On the other hand, negative and positive versions of the change in physical appearance (becomes uglier vs. becomes more beautiful) got almost equal rating.
Further exploratory analyses revealed effects of age and scenario. Relative importance of moral traits grows with age, especially the distance between moral and physical category.
Children responding to the personal scenario ("your friend/someone you know changes") ascribe higher importance to moral traits in comparison to other categories, than children responding to the neutral scenario. We can conclude that the "essential moral self" and the "true self" concepts seem to be present already in children and become more salient with age and in certain personal contexts (friendship).
These findings again point to a strong conceptual connection between personal identity and its impact on the quality of interpersonal relationships.