Article

Imagination, Cognition and

Narrative Construction Personality: Consciousness in

Theory, Research, and Clinical
Practice
of Morality in 2017, Vol. 37(2) 178–198
! The Author(s) 2017
Adolescence Among Reprints and permissions:
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Typically Developing DOI: 10.1177/0276236617733826
journals.sagepub.com/home/ica
and Violence-Exposed
Youth

Monisha Pasupathi1, Cecilia Wainryb1,

Stacia Bourne1, and Roberto Posada2

Abstract
In this article, we explore two different perspectives on what narratives reveal about
differences in moral agency construction across contexts. We focus on contexts that
vary in violence exposure because such exposure has implications for the way youth
develop a sense of moral agency. We elicited narratives about harm-doing from three
samples of youth: a North American typical sample, a North American juvenile
delinquent sample, and a sample of Colombian displaced youth. The latter two
samples have in common a history of significant exposure to violence. Our results
show reductions in psychological content (e.g., references to emotions, thoughts,
and desires) and increases in reciprocity and vengeful themes among violence-
exposed youth, particularly in the context of narrating their own harmful actions.
We consider the meaning of these differences from two different perspectives about
the meaning of narratives.

Keywords
narrative, culture, violence exposure, war, morality

1
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
Corresponding Author:
Monisha Pasupathi, University of Utah, UT, United States.
Email: pasupath@psych.utah.edu
Pasupathi et al. 179

A concern with justice and care is a human birthright—people virtually every-

where agree that behaving fairly and avoiding harm to others are obligatory,
regardless of variations in the social context (e.g., Smetana, 2006; Turiel, 2003).
Moreover, people agree about these issues very early in their development
(Killen & Smetana, 2015), and this widespread moral consensus is believed to
arise from the direct experiences children have with harm and unfairness
(Killen & Smetana, 2015; Wainryb, Brehl, & Matwin, 2005). However, although
the basic concerns with justice and harm avoidance are evident early, there is
also substantial evidence that as they develop, people construct more complex,
nuanced, and sophisticated senses of themselves and others as moral beings
(Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010a; Wainryb et al., 2005).
We examine people’s narratives about morally relevant events in order to
illuminate moral development. Our previous work suggests that across child-
hood and adolescence, people increasingly come to understand their own and
others’ harmful behaviors as arising from complex and multifaceted situations,
including both objective aspects of situations and the more subjective meanings
those situations have for those involved (Wainryb et al., 2005). In fact, by ado-
lescence, the majority of youths’ narratives about harm-doing explain harm in
terms of unintended consequences, conflicting goals, misunderstandings, and
other aspects of colliding subjectivities. Thus, by adolescence, in North
American typical samples, people represent their own and others’ moral
agency around harm-doing in deeply psychological ways. Consider the following
example from a typical North American adolescent girl:

Okay I, I remember . . . I was supposed to [hang out with] one of my best

friends . . . I really didn’t want to and I ended up, I wanted to go with somebody
else . . . so I remember I told her I would go with her one night and she was expect-
ing I would and I kind of said I would knowing . . . that I couldn’t and I had already
agreed with [other friend] . . . And I remember I said I kind of lied to her but I
mostly like avoided her one night and avoided like phone calls and she was expect-
ing to do something and she figured it out and found out and she felt really bad was
hurt and so it wasn’t good but um I just remember she would call me on my phone
on my cell phone I just wouldn’t answer cause I just knew that I would have to tell
her I was doing something else and so . . . RIGHT YEAH . . . I kind of planned
not well.

Note the emphasis on both her own and her friend’s psychological experiences
(wanted, thought, felt, expected, and remember), and the depiction of the harm-
ful act as inevitable, though regrettable, in a world with varied opportunities and
thoroughly comprehensible. Notably infrequent in adolescent accounts from
North American typical samples are accounts of harm in terms of tit-for-tat
sequences of actions without extensive consideration of the psychological experi-
ences of all involved. The absence of tit-for-tat accounts is striking because
180 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

reciprocity norms characterize most human societies and are important facets
of morality (Eisenberger, Lynch, Aselage, & Rohdieck, 2004; Ensminger &
Henrich, 2014).

Reciprocity and Revenge: What Goes Around

Comes Around, but an Eye for an Eye Makes
the Whole World Blind
Reciprocity norms have moral qualities because they are a means for maintain-
ing or restoring fairness or justice. In the context of prosocial actions, reciprocity
is both morally valued and unproblematic—it is good to return favors with
favors and to reciprocate good deeds. In the context of harm-doing, however,
reciprocity involves restoring a sense of fairness by doing further harm, which is
morally problematic. But in both cases, even when the actions are unproblem-
atic, reciprocity as a way of making sense of moral action means yoking one’s
own moral agency to other people’s behaviors. Compared with when people link
their own and others’ actions to psychological states and meanings, this linking
creates a sense of moral agency that offers more limited psychological space
within which to entertain alternative courses of action. Reciprocity in the con-
text of harm is also problematic because it is a stepping stone toward cycles of
vengeance, in which the harms people engage in escalate and continue, rather
than cease after a relatively balanced exchange. The process of escalating
exchanges of harms means that people may begin as perpetrators and then
come to be victims, and vice versa. However, perpetrators and victims construct
quite different senses of moral agency, in ways that may also be important for
understanding reciprocity and vengeance (Baumeister, Stilman, & Wotman,
1990; Wainryb et al., 2005).

Perpetrators and Victims

Among children and adults in North American typical samples, experiences of
doing harm (perpetrator experiences) are complex and typically represent the
moral agency of the narrator as well as moral regard for the victim, expressed
via representing their perspective. Experiences of being harmed by others
(victim experiences) are more unidimensional and if they represent the agency
of the perpetrator, they do so in ways that render the perpetrator’s actions as
inexplicable. These perspective differences have been interpreted as self-protec-
tive (Baumeister et al., 1990) but must also be understood as stemming from the
nature of experiences of harm in the role of perpetrator or victim—that is, as
being in some sense faithful renderings of the narrative truth of the experience
(Wainryb et al., 2005).
Victims narrate harm with a focus on the perpetrator’s actions and their own
hurt feelings and typically view a perpetrator’s actions as unjustified and
Pasupathi et al. 181

disproportionate to any precipitating event (Stillwell, Baumeister, & Del Priore,

2008). These features of victim narratives might promote retaliation, turning
perpetrators into new victims, who can in turn construe the events as dispro-
portionate, focus on the harmful action, and be moved to reciprocate. From this
vantage point, the relative infrequency of narratives about reciprocal harm in
North American typical samples is quite positive in its implications. What this
infrequency means is that North American typical samples do not narrate their
own harm-doing as inextricably linked to prior actions on the part of their
victims, allowing for cyclical exchanges of harm to be interrupted.

Moral Agency and Reciprocity in Violent Contexts

Not all youth grow up and develop moral concepts and moral agency in the
context of a functioning society. But, relatively little is known about what hap-
pens to a developing sense of moral agency in a violent context that entails high
frequencies of both engaging in, and being the target of harm (Posada &
Wainryb, 2008; Wainryb, 2011; Wainryb, Komolova, & Florsheim, 2010;
Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010), as well as an inadequate systemic response to
acts of harm.
One idea is that youth in such contexts come to be morally disengaged, as
they increasingly involve themselves in acts of harm and justify their behavior
(Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorelli, 1996; Staub, 2012). As measured
in moral disengagement questionnaires, this disengaged or less moral state is
reflected in coming to view harmful acts as acceptable or less immoral.
Alternatively, however, we might think of youth as coming to view harm as
unavoidable despite its being morally wrong. Indeed, our own work has shown
that when violence-exposed youth are given the chance to distinguish between
viewing harm as wrong or viewing it as likely, they maintain that harm is wrong
even when they also think that most people (including themselves) are likely to
engage in harm-doing (Posada & Wainryb, 2008). While these findings suggest a
preservation of youth’s moral sensibilities about harm, we think that beliefs in
the inevitability of harm and its ubiquity may ultimately suggest to youth in
violent contexts that agency is not particularly relevant to moral behavior
(Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2010). That is, if youths were convinced that most
people engage in harmful acts in a given context, the links between those actions
and psychological states may seem less important for them to build, because the
state of the world suggests that harm is merely what people do. Accordingly, we
might expect a relative reduction in the degree to which youth’s narratives con-
struct a sense of self and other as having thoughts, beliefs, goals, and emotional
responses within which harmful actions and their aftermaths take on meaning.
Further, in the absence of a functional judicial system, ideas about reciprocity
and restoration of balance may come to carry moral weight to a larger extent
than when there is a judicial system that will punish perpetrators on behalf of
182 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

society (e.g., Govier, 2002; Tyler, 2006). In fact, both in the context of gang
violence (e.g., Decker, 1996; Papachristos, Hurea, & Braga, 2013) and in the
context of the American South (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), scholars have specu-
lated that reciprocity intended to maintain a balance of wrongs between groups
accounts for higher levels of violence in these contexts. As a result, we might
expect that among violence-exposed youth, reciprocity focused and even venge-
ful narratives about harm might be more prevalent than what we have observed
among North American typical samples.
In sum, we are making two predictions about differences between violence-
exposed and North American typical youth’s construction of moral agency and
use of reciprocity themes in narratives about harm. Violence-exposed youth,
compared with North American typical samples, might be less likely to construct
a complex and psychologically embedded sense of moral agency in narrating
harm, and this would be reflected in lower levels of psychological content (e.g.,
references to one’s own and others’ emotions, thoughts, and desires) in their
narratives about harm. We have also suggested that violence-exposed youth
might be more prone than North American typical samples to construct narra-
tives that are framed around reciprocity and revenge concerns. Tests of group
differences in narrative represent a relatively simple design from a methodo-
logical standpoint (although there are always methodological complexities in
making cross-group comparisons). Here, we want to focus on how two different
perspectives on narrative methods, despite converging on a single group-
comparison design, would mean somewhat distinct interpretations of the findings.

Windows and Processes: Two Perspectives on

What Group Differences in Narratives Mean
The implications of any group differences we identify rest on two understandings
of what narrative methods provide. First, there is the idea that narrative pro-
vides a window through which to view psychological aspects of people’s func-
tioning. Second, there is the idea that narrative is a reciprocally constitutive
process that shapes those psychological aspects of people’s functioning while
simultaneously being shaped by that functioning.

Narratives as Windows
In the window view, narratives about harm reflect the state of individuals’ moral
agency and their capacity to engage with the complex trade-offs of moral life.
From this vantage point, narratives reveal developmental and cultural processes
that have taken place prior to the moment of narration. The more subtle and
complex construals of moral agency that are revealed in adolescents’ narratives
about harm, relative to their younger counterparts, are not intrinsically narrative
in nature. Rather, the narrative that reveals those more sophisticated moral
Pasupathi et al. 183

agencies reflects a host of cognitive and social cognitive developmental paths,

embedded in cultural contexts. We suggest that as a window, narratives are
useful, rich, and unique. Narrative captures the real experiences of youth in
ways that other methods intended to reveal psychological functioning do not.
Hypothetical dilemmas and questionnaire items with rating responses are less
well suited to capturing what is salient to youth themselves and are not useful for
capturing features that are not salient to youth, because they presumptively
force responses to those features.

Narratives as a Developmental Process

A different view of narrative is that the narration of experiences in particular
ways plays a critical role in shaping psychological development. From this per-
spective, the more complex and nuanced considerations of moral agency and
moral regard that characterize adolescent and adult narratives about harm,
compared with narratives from younger children, not only reflect more complex
understandings but they also promote more complex understandings prospect-
ively. Relatedly, perspective differences in narratives about harm (e.g., between
perpetrators and victims) not only reflect differences in people’s experiences of
what might well be a single event, they also render reconciliation and a cessation
of conflict more difficult by making it more difficult for perpetrators of harm and
their victims to find common ground and a consensus perspective (Pasupathi,
Fivush, & Hernandez-Martinez, 2016; Pasupathi & Wainryb, in press; Wainryb
& Pasupathi, 2010). Finally, the construction of narratives about harm-doing
in terms of reciprocity and revenge shapes the narrator and the narrator’s
context in ways that may perpetuate cycles of violence. From this perspective,
narratives are not only a window into the present but are also a process by which
development unfolds and a tool with which intervention, when warranted, can
take place.

The Present Study

The present study had two substantive goals. First, we aimed to test the con-
struction of moral agency in samples of typically developing North American
adolescents and violence-exposed youth. To capture two instantiations of the
latter, we examined narratives collected from North American adolescents with
a juvenile record, and Colombian adolescents who were displaced from their
communities as a result of decades-long armed conflicts. All three groups pro-
vided a narrative about a time they harmed another person, and two of the three
groups (North American typically developing adolescents and Colombian dis-
placed adolescents) also provided a narrative about a time they had been harmed
by another person. While all of these samples have been the subject of prior
publications, this is the first article to draw comparisons among them regarding
184 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

moral agency, and the only article to report on reciprocity and vengeance. Our
second aim was to examine whether violence exposure is related to differences in
the nature and prevalence of narratives structured around themes of reciprocity
and revenge.
In addition, a third goal of the present study is related to considering the
implications of our findings from the vantage point of the two perspectives on
narrative methodologies outlined above—if we consider narratives as a window
onto underlying psychological constructs, what follows from these findings? If,
alternatively, we consider narrative as a constructive process that in the aggregate,
actually constitutes self and culture, what different implications follow from the
differences we identify? We return to these issues in the Discussion section.

Method
Participants
This article presents comparisons of three samples drawn from other projects,
with each sample described later. We use the term violence-exposed youth to
refer to both the North American juvenile delinquent youth, and the Colombian
displaced youth collectively.

Typically developing North American youth. Twenty-eight 16- to 17-year-old individ-

uals (14 males) were recruited from schools in a metropolitan area of the
Mountain West. Recruitment procedures are reported in Wainryb et al. (2005).

Juvenile delinquent North American youth. Forty male adolescents (mean age ¼ 16.5
years, range from 14 to 18 years) who were serving time at a youth corrections
facility for committing a violent offense (previously reported in Wainryb et al.,
2010). The included youth had a significant history of criminal activity with
multiple offenses and represented a sample with high exposure to, and involve-
ment in, violent activity. No additional background information was collected
from this sample.

Colombian displaced youth. Colombia’s decades-long civil war has led to the dis-
placement of millions of individuals, with a large concentration relocating to
shanty towns outside the capital of Bogota (Posada & Wainryb, 2008). Forty-
seven adolescents were recruited from a slum area in Bogota, Colombia, that
houses a large concentration of displaced individuals (mean age ¼ 14.6,
range ¼ 13–17); given established changes in narrating and moral agency over
this age range (e.g., Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b) we included only those teens
older than 14 years, leaving a sample size of 32 adolescents, mean age ¼ 15.1,
SD ¼ .8; 16 males. Because one participant provided no narratives, and some
participants provided only a victim or only a perpetrator narrative (n ¼ 3; two
Pasupathi et al. 185

with no victim and one with no perpetrator), sample sizes vary slightly for the
analyses reported later. Recruitment and other procedures are described in
Posada and Wainryb (2008); this sample had a high level of exposure to violence,
as described there.

Measures
Narrative length. We examined the length of the narratives in idea units (roughly
equivalent to verb phrases). Length was the total number of idea units in each
narrative.

Moral agency. As an indicator of moral agency, we examine the proportion of idea

units in each narrative focused on internal psychological or interpretive experi-
ence—thoughts, beliefs, desires, and emotional responses, and the proportion of
idea units in each narrative focused on factual aspects of the experience. This meas-
ure had been previously reliably coded for the typically developing sample (see
Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b for details and reliability) and the juvenile delinquent
sample (see Wainryb et al., 2010 for details and reliability). For the displaced
sample, a research assistant fluent in Spanish and English first trained with the
first two authors on the coding scheme and established accuracy with the previously
coded English-language data. She then proceeded to code the Spanish-language
narratives by dividing them into idea units (verb phrases) and code each unit for
whether it concerned factual or interpretive elements of the narrative. The coder
consulted with the second author, who is a native Spanish speaker, during initial
coding to ensure that she was classifying Spanish-language idea units correctly.

Reciprocity and revenge. Two coders fluent in Spanish and English trained with the
first author on a subset of narratives and then coded all of the narratives for the
presence of reciprocity themes using a four-category scheme. Incomprehensible
narratives were those where the harmful actions ‘‘came out of nowhere’’ and
made no sense for the reader (e.g., narrator reports beating up another kid after
seeing that kid look at the narrator’s car). Comprehensible but nonreciprocal
narratives explained the harmful action in a coherent way but did not rely on
reciprocal exchanges of harms as part of that explanation (e.g., narrator
described upsetting a friend because of skipping her birthday party to attend
a concert; narrator explains robbing someone at gunpoint because of his need
for money to purchase drugs). Reciprocity-based narratives included accounts
which depicted both parties harming one another in sequential ways, even when
the account was not explicitly noting this as a tit-for-tat situation (e.g., narrator
describes how a friend disclosed his secret, after which he spread a rumor about
that friend; narrator describes being mocked by classmates, after which he put
one of them in a chokehold). We employed this relatively lenient definition to
ensure that we were open to evidence of reciprocity norms even when those
186 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

norms were not made explicit by participants. Finally, vengeful narratives

involved reciprocity with escalation or a sense that the vengeful act was morally
justified (e.g., narrator knocks someone down with glee after that person said
something insulting about his mother; narrator describes seeking out members
of a rival gang and physically attacking them in response to their prior attacks).
Reliability for this scheme, assessed on 35 of the 117 cases, was adequate for
both perpetrator narratives, 83% agreement, k ¼ .78, and victim narratives, 83%
agreement, k ¼ .75. When vengeful themes were present, coders additionally
identified whether the narrator was vengeful, the other involved party was
vengeful, or both were depicted as vengeful.

Procedure
While the full procedures are described in more detail elsewhere (see Wainryb et al.,
2005 for the North American typical sample; Wainryb et al., 2010 for the North
American delinquent sample, and Posada & Wainryb, 2008 for the Colombian
displaced sample), all three samples provided a narrative about an instance where
they had harmed someone else. In the North American typical sample and
Colombian displaced sample, participants were interviewed individually and
were asked to describe a ‘‘time when you did or said something, and someone
else felt hurt by it’’ (perpetrator), and a ‘‘time when someone else did or said
something, and you felt hurt by it’’ (victim). The order of the two accounts was
counterbalanced. Interviewers provided nonspecific prompting aimed at eliciting
the most completely elaborated narrative possible. Interviews were conducted in
participants’ native language (English or Spanish, respectively) by native speakers.
North American delinquent youth were interviewed about their family his-
tories and social relationships (Cloward & Florsheim, 1995) and were asked
about a ‘‘time when you became violent.’’ Note that these youth therefore
provided only a perpetrator account; prompt differences must be taken into
account when interpreting the findings.

Results
Analyses are reported separately for perpetrator and victim accounts, because
not all three groups provided both types of narratives. Tables 1 and 2 present
descriptive data for the major analyses reported later. Unless otherwise noted,
we employed analysis of variance-based analyses of primary dependent measures
with group as a between-subjects factor.

Overall Elaboration of Narratives

The length of the narratives in idea units was examined. For perpetrator events,
the three groups did not differ in the length of their narratives, F(2, 95) ¼ 1.6,
Pasupathi et al. 187

Table 1. Length and Percentage of Factual and Interpretive Content in Youth’s Narratives.

Perpetrator Victim

North North North

American American Colombian American Colombian
typicala delinquentb displaced typical displaced

Total length in unitsc (SD) 58.7 (32.6) 69.6 (58.3) 49.0 (44.3) 76.9 (66.2) 47.7 (40.0)
Percentage of facts (SD) 57.0 (18.8) 72.0 (14.9) 52.2 (16.3) 56.9 (19.0) 54.5 (17.8)
Percentage of 37.1 (17.7) 28.0 (14.9) 25.8 (11.7) 37.1 (17.2) 23.1 (17.0)
interpretations (SD)
a
Data taken from Pasupathi and Wainryb (2010b).
b
Data taken from Wainryb et al. (2010).
c
Includes interview-related, filler, and uncodeable units.

Table 2. Reciprocity Themes by Type of Narrative and Sample.

Perpetrator stories Victim stories

North North North

American American Colombian American Colombian
typical delinquent displaced typical displaced

Incomprehensible 7 (25%) 11 (27%) 6 (20%) 14 (50%) 13 (45%)

Sensible but 14 (50%) 13 (32%) 3 (10%) 6 (21%) 5 (17%)
nonreciprocal
Reciprocity 5 (18%) 7 (17%) 13 (43%) 5 (18%) 5 (21%)
Vengeful 2 (7%) 10 (24%) 8 (27%) 3 (11%) 6 (21%)
Note. The numbers in each cell reflect the number of narratives (percentage of narratives) in which each
narrative code was present.

p > .21. For victim events, the North American typical sample generated signifi-
cantly longer events than did the Colombian displaced sample, F(1, 56) ¼ 4.2,
p < .05. Because the groups differed somewhat in the length of their narratives,
we focused on proportions of interpretive content in our analyses.

Proportion of Interpretive Content

For perpetrator narratives, the three groups differed in the proportion of factual
content, F(2, 95) ¼ 13.9, p < .001, with the North American juvenile delinquent
sample narrating more proportionally factual narratives than the Colombian
displaced youth or the North American typical sample. The groups also differed
in the proportion of interpretive content in their perpetrator narratives,
188 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

F(2, 95) ¼ 4.7, p < .02, with the North American typical sample narrating more
proportionally interpretative perpetrator events than either North American
juvenile delinquents or Colombian displaced youth. For victim narratives,
Table 1 shows that North American typical youth narrated stories with propor-
tionally more interpretive content compared with Colombian displaced youth,
F(1, 56) ¼ 9.7, p < .003.

Reciprocity and Revenge Themes

Perpetrator accounts. Table 2 shows the numbers and percentages of youth
from each sample who narrated perpetrator accounts with each category of
reciprocity and revenge themes. As shown, violence-exposed youth were signifi-
cantly more likely to narrate accounts of harm in ways that articulated tit-for-tat
sequences or even explicit mention of vengeful intent, whereas only 2 (7%) of the
typically developing youth organized their narratives around vengeful actions,
2(6) ¼ 17.0, p < .01. Note that references to vengefulness could refer to either
party—in perpetrator accounts with vengeful themes, 50% were about the nar-
rator seeking vengeance, 15% involved mutual vengefulness, and 35% pointed
to vengefulness on the part of the victim.

Victim accounts. As shown in Table 2, victim accounts did not differ as a function
of participant group, 2(3) ¼ 1.1, p > .77. The most frequent type of account for
both groups was incomprehensible. When vengeance themes were present, the
accounts pointed to narrator revenge 44% of the time, both parties 11% of the
time, and vengeance on the part of the other person 44% of the time. Note that in
a victim account, conceptualizing the perpetrator as having acted out of vengeful
desires implicates the victim, albeit only partially, in the exchange of harms.

Discussion
Recall that we had three main goals for the project: (a) to examine differences in
moral agency constructed in narratives about harm among samples of North
American typically developing, North American juvenile delinquent, and
Colombian displaced youth, (b) to examine differences in the use of reciprocity
and revenge to structure harm narratives in these three samples, and (c) to
consider the implications of our findings within two different frameworks for
narrative methods. Below, we take each of these issues in turn, considering
limitations of our study throughout where pertinent.

Violence Exposure and Moral Agency

Consistent with our hypothesis, violence-exposed youth constructed narratives
about harm that had lower proportions of interpretive content relative to North
Pasupathi et al. 189

American typical youth’s narratives, for both perpetrator and victim events.
Importantly, both violence-exposed samples included younger adolescents
than the North American typical sample—and in North American and other
typical samples, the proportions of interpretive content and related features of
narrative meaning-making increase over adolescence (Köber, Schmiedek, &
Habermas, 2015; McLean & Breen, 2009; Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b).
However, the difference between typical and violence-exposed samples is unli-
kely to be completely an artifact of age differences. Rather, the difference
between the samples may lie in the greater severity of the harms described by
violence-exposed youth (for reviews, see Wainryb et al., 2010; Wainryb &
Pasupathi, 2009). It is possible, or even likely, that more severe harms challenge
youth’s capacities to rely on psychological concepts to make sense of their own
and others’ harm-doing.
But beyond the severity of the harms described by violence-exposed youth in
our study is the ubiquity and pervasiveness of harm in their social worlds
(Posada & Wainryb, 2008; Wainryb et al., 2010). This combination of severity,
ubiquity, and pervasiveness poses difficult challenges to building a sense of
moral agency. Because agency has to do with making sense of moral actions
in light of psychological experience, when severe immoral actions happen all the
time and everywhere, conceptualizing one’s own moral agency may seem of
limited use for the individual.

Reciprocity- and Revenge-Structured Narratives Among

Violence-Exposed and North American Typical Youth
Although reciprocity norms are part of most known human societies, our pre-
vious work suggests that reciprocity and revenge are not frequently evident
in harm narratives from North American typical youth. That is, despite
acknowledging reciprocity norms (Eisenberger et al., 2004) and being able to
talk about revenge desires and ideations when directly asked about events in
which they were harmed (Recchia, Wainryb, & Pasupathi, 2017), North
American typical youth do not structure their narratives about harm in ways
that highlight reciprocal exchanges of harm, or seeking of revenge based on
prior acts. Moreover, the relative paucity of such structures is evident across
both victim and perpetrator narratives about harm. Consistent with these find-
ings, as North American typical children grow up, they come to increasingly
evaluate revenge as morally wrong in nonnarrative paradigms (Smetana,
Campione-Barr, & Yell, 2003).
The perpetrator narratives of violence-exposed youth in the present study
represented a striking contrast to the above pattern. First, reciprocity and
revenge themes were markedly more frequent among both groups, constituting
nearly half of the North American delinquent sample’s narratives, and more
than two thirds of the Colombian displaced sample’s narratives (see Astor,
190 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

1994). Only one quarter of the North American typical sample generated such
narratives. In addition, it is noteworthy that the differences emerged in the per-
petrator narratives, where revenge is an explanation for harmful actions toward
others as well as a consequence of those actions. While North American typical
youth can certainly generate ideas about revenge (Recchia et al., 2017), they
typically do so when considering experiences in which they were victims, not
when they were perpetrators. The pattern among violence-exposed youth is part
of a conflation of perpetration and victimization, in which narratives depict an
ongoing flow of one harm after another, either evenly balanced or in some cases
escalating.
Consider the following example from a 16-year-old Colombian displaced
youth (translated from the original):

One day I hit a kid, and everyone looked at me like I was so abusive. But that’s
because he took my stuff. I hit him with my fist. First I told him to give my stuff
back, and he didn’t do it, so that made me mad, and I hit him with my fist. And
everyone yelled at me, and everyone hit me.

Note that the only psychological reference in this narrative is to being angry,
with the remaining content focusing on observable behaviors by the narrator
and others. There is no attempt to understand the other person’s behavior, and
the entire episode is structured as a sequence of harmful actions that beget
further harmful actions. Similar patterns are evident in the juvenile delinquent
sample. While we did not have female delinquent participants, the similarity of
the patterns in the two violence-exposed samples suggests that the phenomenon
is not gender specific.

Implications for Moral Development and Context: Disengagement?

Recall that one view of the effects of violent contexts on moral development is
that youth in such contexts become morally disengaged, viewing harmful acts
as less wrong. The North American juvenile delinquent sample were not asked
whether they viewed their acts as wrong, but the North American typical
and Colombian displaced youth were asked to evaluate their harmful acts.
As reported earlier (Wainryb et al., 2005), North American typical adolescents
describe their harm-doing as at least partially wrong (40%) or completely
wrong (40%). Colombian displaced youth describe their harm as unequivocally
wrong (80%). Differences between the two groups are likely attributable partly
to the nature of the harms described and are also congruent with the way
those harms are narrated. For North American typical youth, the harm-doing
is depicted as being at least partially wrong, and that evaluation is juxtaposed
with the complexities of moral life via constructing moral agencies that involve
Pasupathi et al. 191

colliding subjectivities—much like those articulated in first example we pre-

sented. For Colombian displaced youth, who were even more likely to evaluate
their harm-doing as wrong, harm-doing is embedded in the cyclical exchanges
of harms that characterize their everyday contexts.
A sense of moral agency constructed around reciprocity rather than around
psychological concepts may limit youth’s abilities to conceive of alternative
actions or pathways in the face of the situations they encounter. Because the
thoughts, desires, and emotional reactions that underpin harm-doing also rep-
resent a kind of space between experiences and actions, awareness of those
psychological aspects of experience offers people a moment to consider alterna-
tives. If I am feeling rejected, I can strike out (verbally or physically), but in my
awareness of my own feelings, I might also seek some other solace or solution.
In this way, considering the psychological underpinnings of our experiences
provides a space for the desire to harm, while also making room for reflection
or choices. By contrast, reciprocity and revenge structuring of one’s agency, as
noted, yokes one’s own agency to the actions of others and may reduce the space
within which youth can consider their own desire to harm as well as alternative
possibilities. In this way, reciprocity- and revenge-structured narratives may be
linked to cyclical and perpetual exchanges of harms in ways that extend beyond
their role in justifying actions.
That said, it may be tempting to view the North American typical youth’s
narratives as the standard against which the narratives of violence-exposed
youth fall short. And above, we have promoted the value of comprehensible
but nonreciprocal accounts of harm-doing and have pointed out the ways in
which violence exposure might promote reciprocal- and revenge-structured
accounts with reductions in the psychological content of people’s narratives.
Importantly, one limitation of our presented work is that we do not have com-
parisons with youth from Colombia who are exposed to less violence.
Furthermore, the literature on youth’s narratives about morally relevant experi-
ences is largely limited to the United States (Laible & Thompson, 2002; Recchia,
Wainryb, & Pasupathi, 2013; Wainryb et al., 2005) with a few other countries
represented (Reese, Bird, & Tripp, 2007).
Those countries have been referred to as ‘‘WEIRD’’ (Western, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).
Thus, it may be that the narratives of the North American typical sample are
weird. Reciprocity norms are powerful, universal, and fundamentally human
ways of organizing social and moral life—and while they can lead to cycles
of harm, such norms can also promote remarkable generosity and pro-
social action. What we see in the North American typical sample may repre-
sent a socialization effort against the use of reciprocity and revenge to make
sense of harm; an effort that is aided by the relatively low incidence of
severe harms for youth within WEIRD settings. One hint that reciprocity
192 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

norms are not absent among North American typical samples is that they do
occur, even in the data presented here. For example, a 15-year-old male from
that sample narrated the following:

. . . I kind of remember me and my best friend last summer, He was kind of talking
to his girlfriend on the phone and I just kind of and I came out and just said
something because he is just really tall and skinny so I called him lurpy and his
girlfriend started laughing and I just thought that it was kind of playful or whatever
but he got really angry so he ran into the room and we kind of started yelling at
each other a lot and then we forgot to hang up the phone and we started fighting
you know like fists and stuff so but uh. So she heard everything and then they broke
up the next day so I felt really bad about that. But it was o.k. in the end because
we’re still friends now.

While there is somewhat more psychological content than in our prior example
from the Colombian sample, there is still an emphasis here on observable behav-
iors and an escalating exchange of harmful acts. Beyond the present data, more
vengeful and reciprocity-based thinking among North American typical samples
can also be seen in comparisons of narratives about sibling and friend
harm—the forgiving, generous, nonvengeful, and subtle moral agents that told
the North American typical stories for this study may be the same people who
tell ruthless, vengeful, and intentionally harmful narratives about things they
have done to their siblings (Recchia et al., 2013). Much of the world, as has been
pointed out elsewhere, is not weird. In less weird places, relationships may have
more obligatory qualities and be linked to the provision of material supports as
well as psychological supports (as is the case, arguably, for sibling relationships
in the United States). Such differences can fundamentally alter the experience,
implications, and navigation of harm-doing. In other words, reciprocity and
revenge, despite their limitations in terms of promoting cycles of harm, may
be quite usual and prevalent ways of structuring harm narratives, if we were
to look broadly enough.

Two Perspectives on Narrative Differences Reconsidered

Our third goal for the present project was to consider the implications of our
findings in light of two different approaches to narrative—narrative as a window
and narrative as a process. If narratives are a window, then the findings here reveal
differences in the way youth from different contexts construct a sense of moral
agency. As noted, such differences may tell us something about the nature of harm
experiences in different contexts. In violent contexts, harm is more ubiquitous and
pervasive and may be less likely to warrant narration (Bruner, 1990). In violent
contexts, people may also experience harmful behaviors—both as perpetrators
and as victims—as more separate from psychological concepts like beliefs, desires,
Pasupathi et al. 193

and emotions; these differences in experiences are reflected in the way they narrate
harm. Finally, in violent contexts, youth understand harmful behavior as
enmeshed in exchange sequences of harms—cycles of reciprocity and even venge-
fulness. The implications of these differences may be problematic in terms of
perpetuating harmful behaviors among individuals but are also sensible insofar
as the differences reflect differences in the everyday worlds encountered by youth.
As windows, narratives can also reveal that all youth must struggle with the
inevitability of harmful actions, juxtaposed with the wide agreement that
hurting others is morally wrong. The ubiquity, severity, and pervasiveness of
harm alter some aspects of how this struggle plays out, but the youth we studied
faced the dilemma of having hurt others, and having been hurt by others, while
viewing harm as wrong. Thus, narratives are windows that can simultaneously
reflect commonalities and variations in human experience, and as such, are a
powerful tool in the methodological toolkit for developmental and cultural
psychologists (Fivush & Nelson, 2004; McLean & Syed, 2015; Reese et al.,
2007; Wang, 2004).
As a constitutive developmental process, our narratives both reveal differ-
ences in the way youth build a sense of moral agency from their experiences and
also suggest how youth’s narratives shape that sense of contextualized moral
agency in prospective ways. There is ample evidence from weird samples that
narrating experiences promotes the development of memory, self, and morality
(Fivush & Nelson, 2004; Laible & Thompson, 2002; Pasupathi & Wainryb,
2010a; Reese et al., 2007), and comparative evidence that narrating also
shapes memory, self, and morality in ways that are contextually situated
within cultures and families (McLean, 2016; Pratt et al., 2001; Reese et al.,
2014; Wang, Leichtman, & Davies, 2000). From this view, the narrative differ-
ences we observe can be the starting point for efforts to scaffold youth’s devel-
opment of moral agency—they provide a sense of where youth are and a
potential opportunity to move youth toward a more subtle and complex sense
of moral agency, or away from vengeful themes. Importantly, just as some
North American typical youth narrate with reciprocity themes and sparse psy-
chological content, some violence-exposed youth narrate with more psycho-
logical content and more comprehensible and nonreciprocal accounts, and
perhaps many such youth could do so for at least some of their experiences.
Consider the following narrative from a 14-year-old male Colombian displaced
adolescent (translated):

Sometimes I upset my brother, but it’s just to make a joke. But he gets really upset,
and so then we end up fighting about it. So one time, I started talking to a cousin of
mine, and my brother thought that I was excluding him. He doesn’t like it when I
talk to other people – he feels excluded, he feels like I’m rejecting him. There’s
always these misunderstandings because of that. We almost never fight [physically]
about it, but that time, he thought that I was trying to upset him on purpose, but it
194 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

wasn’t on purpose. It was a joke. So I didn’t think he was going to become furious.
But he got really mad, and then we got into a fistfight.

This narrative contains quite a lot of psychological insights about both the
narrator and the victim and is not built around tit-for-tat actions although
the events described could certainly be narrated in that way. This type of nar-
rative, which may be infrequent, but does occur in the sample, provides some
sense that there is a reservoir for scaffolding different moral understandings.
Our findings suggest some possible limitations about the extent to which
narrative as a developmental process can shift moral agency, however. First,
victim narration may be more difficult as a place to promote growth in under-
standings of moral agency and shifts in reciprocal narration—although victim
narration with reciprocity themes often involves at least tacit acknowledgment
of involvement or complicity. Perpetrator experiences or narratives may afford
more complexity and a more feasible route to shaping and scaffolding more
complex understandings. Because most youth (and indeed, people) experience
harm from both victim and perpetrator perspectives, using perpetrator narration
as a tool to scaffold moral development should ultimately allow youth to hold
nuanced views of moral agency even in the context of being victimized.
Second, inasmuch as the summation of individuals’ narratives about their
lived experience also serves, in the aggregate, to build culturally shared under-
standings, the individual process of constructing some type of moral agency is
also an act of cultural construction, negotiation, and maintenance or change.
If our intuitions are correct concerning the proposition that the ‘‘weird’’
‘‘comprehensible but non-reciprocal’’ narratives of harm provided by the
North American typical samples have at least some beneficial properties, that
approach to narrating harm at the individual level can be part of the process of
constructing a society with reduced vulnerabilities to cycles of harm. In this
view, culturally particular patterns—whether peace promoting or violence main-
taining—can also be altered, one story at a time. That said, violent contexts may
also constrain the extent to which narrative can shift participants’ sense of
themselves and others as moral agents, because the relations between individ-
uals’ narratives about their everyday experiences with harm are reciprocally
intertwined with extant cultural understandings and norms (McLean & Syed,
2015). When vengeful actions are normative, the extent to which individual
narration can change the cultural story may be limited, and one of the most
important directions for future work is to investigate the degree of developmen-
tal potential in individual narratives, across diverse cultural contexts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Pasupathi et al. 195

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

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Author Biographies
Monisha Pasupathi is professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. Her
research interests include narrative, identity, social and emotional development,
and moral development.

Cecilia Wainryb is professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. Her

research interests include social, emotional, and moral development, contexts
of violence and conflict, and narrative.
198 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)

Stacia Bourne is a doctoral candidate in Psychology at the University of Utah.

Her research interests include emotional development, moral development, the
role of contexts of conflict and violence.

Roberto Posada is associate professor in the Department of Psychology at

Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He studies Moral development in contexts
marked by adversity (i.e., poverty, illegality, & violence) and how to promote
moral development in school and educational contexts.