Children protest moral and conventional violations more when they believe actions are freely chosen

Children's beliefs about the emotional consequences of norm adherence and violation

What behaviors make people happy? In the current studies, we investigated 4- to 7-year-old children's (N = 148) emotion attributions for people who follow or violate a conventional norm when doing so aligns or conflicts with other psychological motivations. In Study 1, we tested whether children believe people are happier when they desire (vs. do not desire) adhering to (vs. violating) a norm. In Study 2, we tested whether children believe people are happier when freely choosing (vs. being told) to adhere to (vs. violate) a norm. In both studies, children predicted the highest happiness levels for people who followed norms even when doing so conflicted with other psychological motivators (e.g., wanting or freely choosing to do something). Children also explained their emotion attributions by making reference to norms more often than to desires or personal choices. Results are discussed in terms of implications for children's own norm adherence and early socialization practices in Western cultures.

Unequal by malice, protesters by outrage: Agent perceptions drive moralization of, and collective action against, inequality

Economic inequality does not encounter strong protests even though individuals are generally against it. One potential explanation of this paradox is that individuals do not perceive inequality as caused by intentional agents, which, in line with the Theory of Dyadic Morality (Schein & Gray, 2018), should prevent its assessment as immoral and consequently dampen moral outrage and collective action. Across three studies, we test and confirm this hypothesis. In Studies 1 (N = 395) and 2 (N = 337), the more participants believed that inequality is human driven and caused by intentional agents, the more they moralized inequality, felt outraged and wanted to engage in collective action. This was confirmed in Study 3 (N = 243) through an experimental design. Thus, our research shows that agent perception is crucial in the moralization of economic inequality and, more broadly, that morality can be a powerful motivator and effectively mobilize people to action.

Children and adults' intuitions of what people can believe

Two preregistered studies tested how 5- to 6-year-olds, 7- to 8-year-olds, and adults judged the possibility of holding alternative beliefs (N = 240, 110 females, U.S. sample, mixed ethnicities, data collected from September 2020 through October 2021). In Study 1, children and adults thought people could not hold different beliefs when their initial beliefs were supported by evidence (but judged they could without this evidential constraint). In Study 2, children and adults thought people could not hold different beliefs when their initial beliefs were moral beliefs (but judged they could without this moral constraint). Young children viewed moral beliefs as more constrained than adults. These results suggest that young children already have sophisticated intuitions of the possibility of holding various beliefs and how certain beliefs are constrained.

Being nice by choice: The effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's social evaluations

The ability to engage in counterfactual thinking (reason about what else could have happened) is critical to learning, agency, and social evaluation. However, not much is known about how individual differences in counterfactual reasoning may play a role in children's social evaluations. In the current study, we investigate how prompting children to engage in counterfactual thinking about positive moral actions impacts children's social evaluations. Eighty-seven 4-8-year-olds were introduced to a character who engaged in a positive moral action (shared a sticker with a friend) and asked about what else the character could have done with the sticker (counterfactual simulation). Children were asked to generate either a high number of counterfactuals (five alternative actions) or a low number of counterfactuals (one alternative action). Children were then asked a series of social evaluation questions contrasting that character with one who did not have a choice and had no alternatives (was told to give away the sticker to his friend). Results show that children who generated selfish counterfactuals were more likely to positively evaluate the character with choice than children who did not generate selfish counterfactuals, suggesting that generating counterfactuals most distant from the chosen action (prosociality) leads children to view prosocial actions more positively. We also found age-related changes: as children got older, regardless of the type of counterfactuals generated, they were more likely to evaluate the character with choice more positively. These results highlight the importance of counterfactual reasoning in the development of moral evaluations. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Older children were more likely to endorse agents who choose to share over those who do not have a choice. Children who were prompted to generate more counterfactuals were more likely to allocate resources to characters with choice. Children who generated selfish counterfactuals more positively evaluated agents with choice. Comparable to theories suggesting children punish willful transgressors more than accidental transgressors, we propose children also consider free will when making positive moral evaluations.

Imagination and social cognition in childhood

Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this article, I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition in infancy and childhood. In Section 1, I review a work showing that even in the first year of life, social cognition can be viewed through a nascent ability to imagine the physical possibilities and physical limits on action. In Section 2, I discuss how imagination of what should happen is appropriately constrained by what can happen, and how this influences children's moral evaluations. In the final section, I suggest developmental changes in imagination—especially the ability to imagine improbable events—may have implications for social inference, leading children to learn that inner motives can conflict. These examples point to a flexible and domain‐general process that operates on knowledge to make social meaning.

This article is categorized under:

Psychology > Development and Aging

Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development

Philosophy > Knowledge and Belief

Chimpanzees consider freedom of choice in their evaluation of social action

Judgements of wrongdoing in humans often hinge upon an assessment of whether a perpetrator acted out of free choice: whether they had more than one option. The classic inhibitors of free choice are constraint (e.g. having your hands tied together) and ignorance (e.g. being unaware that an alternative exists). Here, across two studies, we investigate whether chimpanzees consider these factors in their evaluation of social action. Chimpanzees interacted with a human experimenter who handed them a non-preferred item of food, either because they were physically constrained from accessing the preferred item (Experiment 1) or because they were ignorant of the availability of the preferred item (Experiment 2). We found that chimpanzees were more likely to accept the non-preferred food and showed fewer negative emotional responses when the experimenter was physically constrained compared with when they had free choice. We did not, however, find an effect of ignorance on chimpanzee's evaluation. Freedom of choice factors into chimpanzees' evaluation of how they are treated, but it is unclear whether mental state reasoning is involved in this assessment.

Children's judgments of and reasoning about people with disabilities who produce norm violations

People with disabilities may behave in non-normative ways because they cannot act otherwise. This study explored whether U.S. children aged 3.00 to 8.99 years (N = 105) differ in their evaluations of people who commit norm violations when those persons have perceptual or physical disabilities. Across 12 scenarios, children were asked to explain different characters' non-normative behaviors and to evaluate each character's naughtiness. Characters were typically developing, had a physical disability, or had a hearing disability. Disabilities were described to participants but were not visually depicted. Across moral and conventional norm violations, children aged 4.5 years and older judged characters with disabilities as less naughty than characters without disabilities, whereas younger children (3 and 4 years) judged all characters as equally naughty. Children's explanations for characters' non-normative behaviors (acknowledging characters' physical/auditory limitations and inferring negative attributes) significantly predicted their naughtiness judgments; this was true for participants across the sampled age range. Thus, preschool children demonstrated flexibility in their moral judgments across a variety of everyday behavioral violations, tempering their negative evaluations of persons who committed non-normative behaviors when those persons had unseen disabilities that could reasonably account for their actions. Parents and teachers may be able to build on these early moral intuitions to foster greater acceptance of persons with disabilities.

Predicting responsibility judgments from dispositional inferences and causal attributions

The question of how people hold others responsible has motivated decades of theorizing and empirical work. In this paper, we develop and test a computational model that bridges the gap between broad but qualitative framework theories, and quantitative but narrow models. In our model, responsibility judgments are the result of two cognitive processes: a dispositional inference about a person's character from their action, and a causal attribution about the person's role in bringing about the outcome. We test the model in a group setting in which political committee members vote on whether or not a policy should be passed. We assessed participants' dispositional inferences and causal attributions by asking how surprising and important a committee member's vote was. Participants' answers to these questions in Experiment 1 accurately predicted responsibility judgments in Experiment 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, we show that the model also predicts moral responsibility judgments, and that importance matters more for responsibility, while surprise matters more for judgments of wrongfulness.

Toddlers' interventions toward fair and unfair individuals

Cooperative societies rely on reward and punishment for norm enforcement. We examined the developmental origin of these interventions in the context of distributive fairness: past research has shown that infants expect resources to be distributed fairly, prefer to interact with fair distributors, and evaluate others based on their fair and unfair resource allocations. In order to determine whether infants would intervene in third-party resource distributions by use of reward and punishment we developed a novel task. Sixteen-month-old infants were taught that one side of a touch screen produces reward (vocal statements expressing praise; giving a cookie), whereas the other side produces punishment when touched (vocal statements expressing admonishment; taking away a cookie). After watching videos in which one actor distributed resources fairly and another actor distributed resources unfairly, participants' screen touches on the reward and punishment panels while the fair and unfair distributors appeared on screen were recorded. Infants touched the reward side significantly more than the punishment side when presented with the fair distributor but touched the screen sides equally when the unfair distributor was shown. Control experiments revealed no evidence of reward or punishment when infants saw food items they liked and disliked, or individuals uninvolved in the resource distribution events. These results provide the earliest evidence that infants are able to spontaneously intervene in socio-moral situations by rewarding positive actions.

ADHD and Judgments of Impulsivity in Rule Violations

Participants with ADHD (n = 45) and participants without ADHD (n = 130, total n = 175) judged hypothetical moral and conventional rule violations that varied the impulsivity of the act, the ADHD diagnosis, and the gender of the actor in order to examine (1) social reasoning about impulsiveness and (2) whether participants infer impulsiveness from the characteristics of the actor, including gender and ADHD-status. Moral violations were judged more negatively than conventional violations, even when they were impulsive. The characteristics of the actor influenced judgments in that participants judged boys' behavior as more acceptable, as having less control, and as deserving of less punishment compared to girls. In addition, actors who were described as having ADHD were judged overall more positively. Participants with ADHD judged that all actors should receive similar punishment, regardless of the actor's ADHD diagnosis, while participants without ADHD judged actors with ADHD should receive less punishment than those without.

Asymmetric memory for harming versus being harmed

Most people have been both the victim and the perpetrator of a moral transgression at some point in their lives; this article asks whether one set of moral experiences is easier to remember than the other, and why. In Study 1, we documented this basic asymmetry, finding that individuals recalled more instances in which they were the victim of a moral transgression than instances in which they were the perpetrator. In Study 2, we found that this asymmetry in memory arises because experiences of being the victim are perceived more negatively than experiences of being the perpetrator. In Studies 3 and 4, we demonstrated the critical role of intent in this asymmetry, finding that victim memories emphasize perpetrator intent to a greater degree than do perpetrator memories (Study 3), and that the memory asymmetry disappeared when individuals recalled unintentional moral violations (Study 4). Finally, in Study 5, we ruled out a potential alternative mechanism for these effects-that of self-protective motivation on the part of perpetrators. We found that the threat associated with the moral violation moderated victim (but not perpetrator) memories, a finding that is inconsistent with a motivational account for perpetrator memories. This research demonstrates that perceived agency shapes emotional experience and autobiographical memory and speaks to the importance of studying morality as it occurs in everyday contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Normative foundations of reciprocity in preschoolers

Reciprocity has been suggested to represent a crucial normative principle for humans. The current study aimed to investigate the normative foundations of reciprocity and the development of a reciprocity norm in young children. To this end, we presented 3- to 6-year-olds with three conditions. In one condition, a protagonist reciprocated sharing a large proportion of resources. In another condition, a protagonist reciprocated sharing a small proportion of resources. In a third condition, a protagonist did not reciprocate sharing a large proportion by giving rather few resources and, thus, violated a reciprocity norm. Results show that 5- and 6-year-olds endorse compliance with a reciprocity norm, which is reflected in their evaluations of the protagonists and their spontaneous verbal affirmation of reciprocal behavior. In contrast, 3- and 4-year-olds exclusively valued general prosociality, neglecting reciprocity. This indicates that children acquire a norm of reciprocity during the course of the preschool period.

Children use rules to coordinate in a social dilemma

Humans are frequently required to coordinate their actions in social dilemmas (e.g. when one of two drivers has to yield for the other at an intersection). This is commonly achieved by individuals following communally known rules that prescribe how people should behave. From relatively early in development, children swiftly pick up the rules of their culture and even start creating game rules among peers. Thus far, however, little is known about children's abilities create rules to regulate their own interactions in social dilemma situations in which individuals' interests are partially in conflict. Here, we repeatedly selected dyads of children (5- and 8-year-olds, N = 144) at random from a group and presented them with a chicken game - a social dilemma in which individuals have conflicting motives but coordination is required to avoid mutual failure. In game breaks, groups reconvened and had the opportunity to think of additional game rules. Eight- but not five-year-olds readily came up with and agreed upon impartial rules to guide their subsequent game behavior (but only after adult prompting). Moreover, when playing by the self-made rules, children achieved higher payoffs, had fewer conflicts, and coordinated with greater efficiency than when playing without a rule - which mimics the functional consequences of rules on a societal level. These findings suggest that by at least age 8, children are capable of using rules to independently self-regulate potential conflicts of interest with peers.

Crime but not punishment? Children are more lenient toward rule-breaking when the "spirit of the law" is unbroken

Even early in development, children understand how rules work, and they harshly evaluate rule violators. Furthermore, we know that adults make nuanced evaluations about rule violations; in many situations, they believe that it can be acceptable to violate the technical language of a rule (the "letter of a rule") if doing so does not violate the reason why the rule was created (the "spirit of the rule"). Distinguishing between the letter and spirit of a rule is critical for a developed normative understanding. We investigated whether and when children begin to believe that it is less wrong to violate the letter of a rule if one does not violate the rule's spirit. Participants (N = 246 4- to 10-year-olds) were asked to evaluate a rule-breaker who either violated the letter of a rule but not the spirit or violated both the letter and spirit of a rule. We found that by 4 years of age, children acknowledged that the rule had technically been broken in both cases, but their evaluations of the rule-breaker were much more lenient in the case where the spirit of the rule remained intact. We also found that children are increasingly more lenient in the case where the spirit of the rule remains intact case as they age, and they are increasingly harsher in the case where the spirit is violated. We discuss how these studies provide insight into early normative reasoning, including implications for future research on social cognitive development, rule learning, and legislative intent.

Preschoolers Understand the Moral Dimension of Factual Claims

Research on children’s developing moral cognition has mostly focused on their evaluation of, and reasoning about, others’ intrinsically harmful (non-)verbal actions (e.g., hitting, lying). But assertions may have morally relevant (intended or unintended) consequences, too. For instance, if someone wrongly claims that “This water is clean!,” such an incorrect representation of reality may have harmful consequences to others. In two experiments, we investigated preschoolers’ evaluation of others’ morally relevant factual claims. In Experiment 1, children witnessed a puppet making incorrect assertions that would lead to harm or to no harm. In Experiment 2, incorrect assertions would always lead to harm, but the puppet either intended the harm to occur or not. Children evaluated the puppet’s factual claim more negatively when they anticipated harmful versus harmless consequences (Experiment 1) and when the puppet’s intention was bad versus good over and above harmful consequences (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that preschoolers’ normative understanding is not limited to evaluating others’ intrinsically harmful transgressions but also entails an appreciation of the morally relevant consequences of, and intentions underlying, others’ factual claims.

The ontogeny of intent-based normative judgments

When evaluating norm transgressions, children begin to show some sensitivity to the agent's intentionality around preschool age. However, the specific developmental trajectories of different forms of such intent-based judgments and their cognitive underpinnings are still largely unclear. The current studies, therefore, systematically investigated the development of intent-based normative judgments as a function of two crucial factors: (a) the type of the agent's mental state underlying a normative transgression, and (b) the type of norm transgressed (moral versus conventional). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old children as well as adults were presented with vignettes in which an agent transgressed either a moral or a conventional norm. Crucially, she did so either intentionally, accidentally (not intentionally at all) or unknowingly (intentionally, yet based on a false belief regarding the outcome). The results revealed two asymmetries in children's intent-based judgments. First, all age groups showed greater sensitivity to mental state information for moral compared to conventional transgressions. Second, children's (but not adults') normative judgments were more sensitive to the agent's intention than to her belief. Two subsequent studies investigated this asymmetry in children more closely and found evidence that it is based on performance factors: children are able in principle to take into account an agent's false belief in much the same way as her intentions, yet do not make belief-based judgments in many existing tasks (like that of Study 1) due to their inferential complexity. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more systematic understanding of the development of intent-based normative judgment.

An Actor's Knowledge and Intent Are More Important in Evaluating Moral Transgressions Than Conventional Transgressions

An actor's mental states-whether she acted knowingly and with bad intentions-typically play an important role in evaluating the extent to which an action is wrong and in determining appropriate levels of punishment. In four experiments, we find that this role for knowledge and intent is significantly weaker when evaluating transgressions of conventional rules as opposed to moral rules. We also find that this attenuated role for knowledge and intent is partly due to the fact that conventional rules are judged to be more arbitrary than moral rules; whereas moral transgressions are associated with actions that are intrinsically wrong (e.g., hitting another person), conventional transgressions are associated with actions that are only contingently wrong (e.g., wearing pajamas to school, which is only wrong if it violates a dress code that could have been otherwise). Finally, we find that it is the perpetrator's belief about the arbitrary or non-arbitrary basis of the rule-not the reality-that drives this differential effect of knowledge and intent across types of transgressions.

Three-Year-Olds' Reactions to a Partner's Failure to Perform Her Role in a Joint Commitment

When children make a joint commitment to collaborate, obligations are created. Pairs of 3-year-old children (N = 144) made a joint commitment to play a game. In three different conditions the game was interrupted in the middle either because: (a) the partner child intentionally defected, (b) the partner child was ignorant about how to play, or (c) the apparatus broke. The subject child reacted differently in the three cases, protesting normatively against defection (with emotional arousal and later tattling), teaching when the partner seemed to be ignorant, or simply blaming the apparatus when it broke. These results suggest that 3-year-old children are competent in making appropriate normative evaluations of intentions and obligations of collaborative partners.

Parents scaffold flexible imitation during early childhood

Children use imitation flexibly to acquire the instrumental skills and conventions of their social groups. This study (N=69 parent and 3- to 6-year-old child dyads) examined the impact of instrumental versus conventional language on (a) children's imitative flexibility in the context of parent-child interaction and (b) how parents scaffold children's imitation. Children in dyads presented with conventional language imitated with higher fidelity than children in dyads presented with instrumental language. Parents in dyads presented with conventional language also provided their children with more instruction to imitate and engaged in more encouragement, demonstration, and monitoring than parents in dyads presented with instrumental language. The relation between language cue and children's imitative fidelity was mediated by parent scaffolding behavior. The results provide evidence that caregivers support the development of flexible imitation during early childhood by adjusting their scaffolding according to the goal of the behavior.

Young children infer preferences from a single action, but not if it is constrained

Inferring others' preferences is socially important and useful. We investigated whether children infer preferences from the minimal information provided by an agent's single action, and whether they avoid inferring preference when the action is constrained. In three experiments, children saw vignettes in which an agent took a worse toy instead of a better one. Experiment 1 shows that this single action influences how young children infer preferences. Children aged three and four were more likely to infer the agent preferred the worse toy when the agent took this toy, compared with when the agent did not take either toy. Experiment 2 then shows that children consider constraints when inferring preferences from a single action. From age 5, children were less likely to avoid inferring a preference for the worse toy when the agent's action was physically constrained. Finally, Experiment 3 provides evidence that children's and adults' sensitivity to constraints, when inferring preferences, is not based on a general notion of constraints, and instead depends on several specific notions. Whereas 5-6-year-olds in this experiment considered physical and socio-moral constraints when inferring preferences, they had difficulty grasping the relevance of epistemic constraints. Adults considered physical and epistemic constraints, but were not influenced by the socio-moral constraint of ownership. Together these findings contribute to a picture of cognitive development in which children are able to infer non-obvious properties on the basis of minimal concrete information, and are also sensitive to subtle changes in this information.

Moral judgment as information processing: an integrative review

How do humans make moral judgments about others’ behavior? This article reviews dominant models of moral judgment, organizing them within an overarching framework of information processing. This framework poses two distinct questions: (1) What input information guides moral judgments? and (2) What psychological processes generate these judgments? Information Models address the first question, identifying critical information elements (including causality, intentionality, and mental states) that shape moral judgments. A subclass of Biased Information Models holds that perceptions of these information elements are themselves driven by prior moral judgments. Processing Models address the second question, and existing models have focused on the relative contribution of intuitive versus deliberative processes. This review organizes existing moral judgment models within this framework and critically evaluates them on empirical and theoretical grounds; it then outlines a general integrative model grounded in information processing, and concludes with conceptual and methodological suggestions for future research. The information-processing framework provides a useful theoretical lens through which to organize extant and future work in the rapidly growing field of moral judgment.