Happy victimizing

Happy victimizing phenomenon, happy victimization phenomenon or happy victimizer phenomenon is a phenomenon in child development, in particular, in their moral development and cognitive development. It amounts to an apparent disparity in moral conceptions of children under the age 6-7: while they understand that the acts of victimization are wrong, they attribute exclusively positive or "happy" emotions to victimizers, who achieve their goals while harming others.^[1][2] While the idea that "getting what one wants" is good regardless the cost may be attributed to people of any age, the happy victimizer phenomenon appears to contradict a number of mainstream theories according to which the awareness of victim's harm is supposed to give rise to certain negative emotions, such as remorse or fear of punishment.^[1]

Bryan Sokol points out^[1] that the earliest demonstration that young children ascribe the wrongdoers positive emotions was provided in 1980 by Barden, Zelko, Duncan, and Masters. It their test they provided 40 hypothetical situations and asked to predict one of the selected affective reactions ("happy", "scared", "sad", etc.) They singled out an observation that the situation "dishonesty (not caught)" was predicted by the youngest children to produce the "happy" emotion, while in the oldest group the consensus was for "fear".^[3] A more detailed and frequently cited as pioneering^[1] report was that of Nunner-Winkler and Sodian (1988). In an effort to clarify the nature of young children's morality they conducted a certain experiment and reported that most 4-year-olds attributed positive moral emotions to the wrongdoer focusing on the successful outcome of the wrongdoer's action, while 8-year-olds focused on the moral value of the wrongdoer's action and therefore attributed him negative feelings.^[4]

Further reading:^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]}

References

1. Bryan W. Sokol, "Children’s conceptions of agency and morality : making sense of the happy victimizer phenomenon", 2004, Ph.D. thesis doi:10.14288/1.0092387
2. Mari Hasegawa, "Developing Moral Emotion Attributions in Happy Victimizer Task: Role of Victim Information", Japanese Psychological Research, 2018, Volume 60, No. 1, 38–46, doi:10.1111/jpr.12179
3. R C Barden, F A Zelko, S W Duncan, J C Masters, "Children's consensual knowledge about the experiential determinants of emotion", Pers Soc Psychol. 1980 Nov;39(5):968-76, also doi:[https://doi.org/10.1037%2F%2F0022-3514.39.5.968 10.1037//0022-3514.39.5.968
4. Nunner-Winkler, G., Sodian, B. (1988), "Children’s understanding of moral emotions", Child Development, vol. 59, no. 5, 1988, 1323–1338, JSTOR 1130495, doi:10.2307/1130495
5. Gerhard Minnameier, "The problem of moral motivation and the happy victimizer phenomenon: killing two birds with one stone", New Dir Child Adolesc Dev. Fall 2010;2010(129):55-7, doi:10.1002/cd.275
6. Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, "Moral Motivation and the Happy Victimizer Phenomenon", In: Handbook of Moral Motivation. Moral Development and Citizenship Education, vol 1. SensePublishers, Rotterdam. doi:10.1007/978-94-6209-275-4_16
7. Arsenio, W., & A. Lover (1995). Children’s conceptions of sociomoral affect: Happy victimizers, mixed emotions, and other expectancies. In M. Killen and D. Hart (Eds.), Morality in everyday life (pp. 87-128). New York: Cambridge University Press.
8. Keller, M., O. Lourenco, et al. (2003). The multifaceted phenomenon of ’happy victimizers’: A crosscultural comparison of moral emotions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 21, 1-18.
9. Lourenco, O. (1997). Children’s attributions of moral emotions to victimizers: Some data, doubts and suggestions. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 15, 425-438. doi:10.1111/j.2044-835X.1997.tb00739.x
10. Gerhard Minnameier, A cognitive approach to the ‘happy victimiser’, Journal of Moral Education, doi:10.1080/03057240.2012.700893, 41, 4, (491-508), (2012).