Moral Reactions to Sexual Relationships that Violate Age Norms

ABSTRACT

We examined whether Moral Foundations Theory helps explain Americans’ reactions to violations of age-related sexual norms. Attitudes toward sexual relationships between two adolescents, an adolescent and a young adult, and two adults of highly discrepant ages were obtained from a nationally representative sample of 1,117 adults in the United States. The sex of the older person was manipulated in the age-discrepant scenarios. We found that respondents for whom purity was an important value were generally more likely to be bothered by these sexual activities. The reaction to sexual relationships between adolescent girls and young men was an exception. For this type of relationship, the negative reaction was related to the fairness foundation, suggesting that respondents thought the relationship involved exploitation. Reactions to violations of age norms were unrelated to whether respondents had a strong harm foundation, suggesting that their reactions were not motivated by concern that such relationships are harmful to participants. Finally, we found that male respondents were less likely to react negatively to age violations than female respondents, particularly when the sexual relationship involved an adolescent boy and a young woman.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Jason R. Silver for providing helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Research on the adolescent brain suggests that it is oriented to low self-control and strong emotional responses (e.g., Giedd, 2015).

² Banks and Arnold (2001) argued that age-discrepant relationships activate incest-avoidance disgust responses, since these relationships resemble parent-child romantic relationships. However, the impact of age-discrepancy on disgust is likely to vary across time and place.

³ These studies did not examine other moral foundations.

⁴ The American Community Survey is an ongoing, nationally representative survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau each year. It is sent to over 3.5 million households in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

⁵ A sixth item (It can never be right to kill a human being) was omitted from the scale because it reduced the scale alpha to .67.

⁶ A sixth item (I think it’s morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing) was omitted from the scale because it reduced the scale alpha to .64.

⁷ Since the items about chastity and God may have an overly strong influence on attitudes toward sex regardless of the age of participants, we reran all analyses with those items removed from the purity scale. The results were substantively unchanged.

⁸ Eight respondents chose “other.” We removed them from the sample, since there were too few to analyze separately.

⁹ The attitudes toward the three scenarios were moderately correlated with each other (r = .31 for adolescent sex and adolescent-adult sex; r = .19 for adolescent sex and adult-adult sex; and r = .31 for adolescent-adult sex and adult-adult sex).

¹⁰ Our results do not address the issue of whether these sexual relationships are harmful to the participants. Scholars disagree about how often and when the sexual abuse of young people is traumatic (e.g., Clancy, 2009; Felson et al., 2019; Finkelhor, 1979; Rind et al., 1998).