The categorization of "bad animal" and its relation to animal appearances: A study of 6-year-old children's perceptions

Abstract

This study was motivated by anecdotal observations of preschool children's demonizing some animals while playing with animal figures (e.g., calling them "bad guys"). Interestingly, there seems to exist a cross-cultural history of representing certain animals as evil. In order to understand the psychological underpinning beneath this sociocultural phenomenon, this exploratory study focuses on perceptual cues associated with moral value attribution to animals. In a two-part study on 6-year-old South Korean children, we first contrasted children's drawings of a "bad" animal with that of a "good" animal in their appearance features. The significant distinguishing traits could be interpreted as the features of an angry person or a carnivorous animal, which in general convey the emotional property of threat. Next, the effects of threatening appearance features on animal moralization were tested and yielded statistical significance. We propose that the process of negative moralization may depend upon the emotional state of fear evoked by specific visual signals with hazardous ecological contents. The communicative role of threatening signals would have been especially important both in inter-species (i.e., sources of selection by predation) and intra-species conflicts during the course of human evolution. Additional implications for understanding how and why cultural representations of demonized animals are created and shared will also be discussed. © 2012 Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology.