Children's predictions of consistency in people's actions

The origins of moral sensitivities: Probing infants' expectations, evaluations, generalization, and enforcement of moral norms

Identifying the origins of moral sensitivities, and their elaboration, within infancy and early childhood is a challenging task, given inherent limitations in infants' behavior. Here, I argue for a multi-pronged, multi-method approach that involves cleaving the moral response at its joints. Specifically, I chart the emergence of infants' moral expectations, evaluations, generalization and enforcement, demonstrating that while many moral sensitivities are present in the second year of life, these sensitivities are closely aligned with, and likely driven by, infants' everyday experience. Moreover, qualitative differences exist between the moral responses that are present in infancy and those of later childhood, particularly in terms of enforcement (i.e., a lack of punishment in infancy). These findings set the stage for addressing outstanding critical questions regarding moral development, that include identifying discrete causal inputs to early moral cognition, identifying whether moral cognition is distinct from social cognition early in life, and explaining gaps that exist between moral cognition and moral behavior in development.

Do children interpret informants' confidence as person-specific or situational?

Children prefer to learn from confident rather than hesitant informants. However, it is unclear how children interpret confidence cues: these could be construed as strictly situational indicators of an informant's current certainty about the information they are conveying, or alternatively as person-specific indicators of how "knowledgeable" someone is across situations. In three studies, 4- and 5-year-olds (Experiment 1: N = 51, Experiment 3: N = 41) and 2- and 3-year-olds (Experiment 2: N = 80) saw informants differing in confidence. Each informant's confidence cues either remained constant throughout the experiment, changed between the history and test phases, or were present during the history but not test phase. Results suggest that 4- and 5-year-olds primarily treat confidence cues as situational, whereas there is uncertainty around younger preschoolers' interpretation due to low performance.

Teenagers' but not young adults' beliefs about intrinsic interpersonal obligations for group members

Previous research has indicated that children perceive social category members as having intrinsic obligations toward each other, which shape their expectations for social interactions. However, it is unclear whether teenagers (aged 13 to 15) and young adults (aged 19 to 21) continue to hold such beliefs, given their increased experience with group dynamics and external social rules. To explore this question, three experiments were conducted with a total of 360 participants (N = 180 for each age group). Experiment 1 examined negative social interactions using different methods in two sub-experiments, while Experiment 2 focused on positive social interactions to examine whether participants viewed social category members as intrinsically obligated to avoid harming each other and to offer assistance. Results revealed that teenagers evaluated within-group harm and non-help as unacceptable, regardless of external rules, whereas they viewed between-group harm and non-help as both acceptable and unacceptable, depending on the presence of external rules. Conversely, young adults considered both within-group and between-group harm/non-help as more acceptable if an external rule permitted such behavior. These findings suggest that teenagers believe that members of a social category are intrinsically obligated to help and not harm each other, whereas young adults believe that individual social interactions are constrained mainly by external rules. That is, teenagers hold stronger beliefs than young adults about intrinsic interpersonal obligations to group members. Thus, in-group moral obligations and external rules contribute differently to the evaluation and interpretation of social interactions at different developmental stages.

Generalizing across moral sub-domains: infants bidirectionally link fairness and unfairness to helping and hindering

Across two experiments, we investigated whether infants use prior behavior to form expectations about future behavior within the moral domain, focusing on the sub-domains of fairness and help/harm. In Experiment 1, 14- to 27-month-old infants were familiarized to an agent who either helped or hindered another agent to obtain her goal. At test, infants saw the helper or hinderer perform either a fair or unfair distribution of resources to two recipients. Infants familiarized to helping looked longer to the unfair distribution than the fair distribution at test, whereas infants familiarized to hindering looked equally at both test events, suggesting that hindering led infants to suspend baseline expectations of fairness. In Experiment 2, infants saw these events in reverse. Following familiarization to fair behavior, infants looked equally to helping and hindering; in contrast, following familiarization to unfair behavior, infants looked significantly longer to helping than hindering on test, suggesting that prior unfair behavior led infants to expect the agent to hinder another agent's goals. These results suggest that infants utilize prior information from one moral sub-domain to form expectations of how an individual will behave in another sub-domain, and that this tendency seems to manifest more strongly when infants initially see hindering and unfair distributions than when they see helping and fair distributions. Together, these findings provide evidence for consilience within the moral domain, starting by at least the second year of life.

Helpers or halos: examining the evaluative mechanisms underlying selective prosociality

This research examines the proximate evaluative mechanisms underlying prosocial partner choice-based reciprocity. Across four studies we presented 855 university undergraduates (online for course credit) and 76 4- to 6-year-olds (offline at a university laboratory) with vignettes describing prosocial, social and non-social characters, and asked participants about their person preferences in prosocial, social and general contexts. Adults demonstrated sophisticated appraisals, coordinating between relevant trait and contextual cues to make selections. Adults were particularly attentive to prosocial cues in costly conditions, suggesting that they were using dispositional attributions to make their selections. By contrast, children were largely unable to integrate trait and contextual cues in determining their partner preferences, instead displaying valenced preferences for non-social cues, suggesting the use of affective tagging. Together, these studies demonstrate that the mechanisms underlying prosocial, partner choice-based reciprocity are not early emerging and stable but show considerable development over the lifespan.

Traits or Circumstances? Children's Explanations of Positive and Negative Behavioral Outcomes

This study examined the extent to which children rely on traits to explain behavior. One hundred twenty-eight 4- to 7-year-olds were told stories about actors' behaviors that led to positive or negative outcomes. Outcomes could be explained with reference to positive or negative traits (niceness or meanness) or transient or irrelevant situational characteristics (such as emotions, biological states, and social categories). Generally, findings indicated that the majority of children referred to traits to explain behaviors and this tendency increased with age. Among non-trait explanations, emotions were used prominently at all ages to explain negative behavior. Older children in particular discounted traits as an explanation for negative outcomes when alternate explanations such as negative emotions were available. Latent Class Analyses captured individual difference attributional profiles among children: although most children were trait theorists, some children referred consistently to non-trait or situational explanations. Two other profiles reflected positivity and negativity biases in children's explanations. These findings contribute to our knowledge about the relative influence of trait and non-trait explanations for positive and negative behavioral outcomes; we also present the first evidence for profiles of personality attribution.

The Influence of Gender Categories and Gender Stereotypes on Young Children's Generalizations of Biological and Behavioral Characteristics

We examined the influence of categorization and stereotyping on young children's (N = 96; 39 to 71 months of age) use of gender to make generalizations regarding novel biological and behavioral characteristics. Participants were asked to sort pictures of children according to either gender, common gender stereotypes, or shirt color. Then participants performed a triad inductive reasoning task. Children in the Stereotype condition consistently generalized on the basis of gender, but performance was inconsistent in the absence of stereotyping. Results are discussed in relation to variability in early gender cognition.

The Development of Social Categorization

Social categorization is a universal mechanism for making sense of a vast social world with roots in perceptual, conceptual, and social systems. These systems emerge strikingly early in life and undergo important developmental changes across childhood. The development of social categorization entails identifying which ways of classifying people are culturally meaningful, how these categories might be used to predict, explain, and evaluate the behavior of other people, and how one's own identity relates to these systems of categorization and representation. Social categorization can help children simplify and understand their social environment but has detrimental consequences in the forms of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. Thus, understanding how social categorization develops is a central problem for the cognitive, social, and developmental sciences. This review details the multiple developmental processes that underlie this core psychological capacity.

Normative Social Role Concepts in Early Childhood

The current studies (N = 255, children ages 4-5 and adults) explore patterns of age-related continuity and change in conceptual representations of social role categories (e.g., "scientist"). In Study 1, young children's judgments of category membership were shaped by both category labels and category-normative traits, and the two were dissociable, indicating that even young children's conceptual representations for some social categories have a "dual character." In Study 2, when labels and traits were contrasted, adults and children based their category-based induction decisions on category-normative traits rather than labels. Study 3 confirmed that children reason based on category-normative traits because they view them as an obligatory part of category membership. In contrast, adults in this study viewed the category-normative traits as informative on their own (not only as a cue to obligations). Implications for continuity and change in representations of social role categories will be discussed.

Children’s Judgments of Epistemic and Moral Agents: From Situations to Intentions

Children’s evaluations of moral and epistemic agents crucially depend on their discerning that an agent’s actions were performed intentionally. Here we argue that children’s epistemic and moral judgments reveal practices of forgiveness and blame, trust and mistrust, and objection or disapproval and that such practices are supported by children’s monitoring of the situational constraints on agents. Inherent in such practices is the understanding that agents are responsible for actions performed under certain conditions but not others. We discuss a range of situational constraints on children’s early epistemic and moral evaluations and clarify how these situational constraints serve to support children’s identification of intentional actions. By monitoring the situation, children distinguish intentional from less intentional action and selectively hold epistemic and moral agents accountable. We argue that these findings inform psychological and philosophical theorizing about attributions of moral and epistemic agency and responsibility.

Underrepresentation and the Perception of Others’ Racial Attitudes

Across two experiments, we investigate racial attitude perceptions in low-diversity environments to explore whether friendships with members of numerically underrepresented groups serve as a stronger indication of individuals’ racial attitudes than friendships with members of the numeric majority. Children aged 7–10 years heard about a Black (Experiment 1) or White (Experiment 2) protagonist befriending two classmates who belonged to either the numeric minority or majority group. When protagonists befriended classmates from the numeric minority rather than the numeric majority, participants inferred racial preferences among Black protagonists who befriended in-group (but not out-group) children and White protagonists who befriended in-group and out-group children. Racial preferences were not assumed when children made inferences about others’ choice of future social partners. This work has implications for understanding how the racial composition of environments may affect perceptions of the same-race and cross-race friendships.

The Out-Group Homogeneity Effect Across Development: A Cross-Cultural Investigation

The present studies investigated the out-group homogeneity effect in 5- and 8-year-old Israeli and German children (n = 150) and adults (n = 96). Participants were asked to infer whether a given property (either biological or psychological) was true of an entire group-either the participants' in-group ("Jews" or "Germans") or their out-group ("Arabs" or "Turks"). To that end, participants had to select either a homogenous or a heterogeneous sample of group members. It was found that across ages and countries, participants selected heterogeneous samples less often when inferring the biological properties of out-compared to in-group members. No effect was found regarding psychological properties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the origins of intergroup bias.

Once a frog-lover, always a frog-lover?: Infants' goal generalization is influenced by the nature of accompanying speech

The ability to interpret choices as enduring preferences that generalize beyond the immediate situation gives adults a powerful means of predicting and explaining others' behavior. How do infants come to recognize that current choices can be driven by generalizable preferences? Although infants can encode others' actions in terms of goals (Woodward, 1998), there is evidence that 10-month-olds still fail to generalize goal information presented in one environment to an event sequence occurring in a new environment (Sommerville & Crane, 2009). Are there some circumstances in which infants interpret others' goals as generalizable across environments? We investigate whether the vocalizations a person produces while selecting an object in one room influences infants' generalization of the goal to a new room. Ten-month-olds did not spontaneously generalize the actor's goal, but did generalize the actor's goal when the actor initially accompanied her object selection with a statement of preference. Infants' generalization was not driven by the attention-grabbing features of the statement or the mere use of language, as they did not generalize when the actor used matched nonspeech vocalizations or sung speech. Infants interpreted the goal as person-specific, as they did not generalize the choice to a new actor. We suggest that the referential specificity of accompanying speech vocalizations influences infants' tendency to interpret a choice as personal rather than situational. (PsycINFO Database Record

Giving and taking: representational building blocks of active resource-transfer events in human infants

Active resource transfer is a pervasive and distinctive feature of human sociality. We hypothesized that humans possess an action schema of giving specific for representing social interactions based on material exchange, and specified the set of necessary assumptions about giving events that this action schema should be equipped with. We tested this proposal by investigating how 12-month-old infants interpret abstract resource-transfer events. Across eight looking-time studies using a violation-of-expectation paradigm we found that infants were able to distinguish between kinematically identical giving and taking actions. Despite the surface similarity between these two actions, only giving was represented as an object-mediated social interaction. While we found no evidence that infants expected the target of a giving or taking action to reciprocate, the present results suggest that infants interpret giving as an inherently social action, which they can possibly use to map social relations via observing resource-transfer episodes.

Verbal framing of statistical evidence drives children's preference inferences

Although research has shown that statistical information can support children's inferences about specific psychological causes of others' behavior, previous work leaves open the question of how children interpret statistical information in more ambiguous situations. The current studies investigated the effect of specific verbal framing information on children's ability to infer mental states from statistical regularities in behavior. We found that preschool children inferred others' preferences from their statistically non-random choices only when they were provided with verbal information placing the person's behavior in a specifically preference-related context, not when the behavior was presented in a non-mentalistic action context or an intentional choice context. Furthermore, verbal framing information showed some evidence of supporting children's mental state inferences even from more ambiguous statistical data. These results highlight the role that specific, relevant framing information can play in supporting children's ability to derive novel insights from statistical information.

Conforming to coordinate: children use majority information for peer coordination

Humans are constantly required to coordinate their behaviour with others. As this often relies on everyone's convergence on the same strategy (e.g., driving on the left side of the road), a common solution is to conform to majority behaviour. In this study, we presented 5-year-old children with a coordination problem: To retrieve some rewards, they had to choose the same of four options as a peer partner--in reality a stooge--whose decision they were unable to see. Before making a choice, they watched a video showing how other children from their partner's peer group had behaved; a majority chose the same option and a minority chose a different one. In a control condition, children watched the same video but could then retrieve the reward irrespective of their partner's choice (i.e., no coordination was necessary). Children followed the majority more often when coordination was required. Moreover, conformers mostly justified their choices by referring to the majority from the video demonstration. This study is the first to show that young children are able to strategically coordinate decisions with peers by conforming to the majority.

Playing by the rules: self-interest information influences children's trust and trustworthiness in the absence of feedback

This study documented how children's decisions to trust and help partners in a game depend on the game's incentives. Adults, 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds (N=128) guessed the location of hidden prizes, assisted by a partner who observed the hiding. After each hiding event the partner shared information with participants about the prize's location. Participants earned prizes every time they guessed correctly. The partner earned prizes either from participants' correct (cooperation incentive) or incorrect (competition incentive) guesses. Children and adults trusted their partner more often when the game incentivized cooperation versus competition. A complementary pattern was observed when participants assisted their partner find prizes they observed being hidden: Participants strategically shared truthful information more often when the game rewarded cooperation.

Children's use of communicative intent in the selection of cooperative partners

Within the animal kingdom, human cooperation represents an outlier. As such, there has been great interest across a number of fields in identifying the factors that support the complex and flexible variety of cooperation that is uniquely human. The ability to identify and preferentially interact with better social partners (partner choice) is proposed to be a major factor in maintaining costly cooperation between individuals. Here we show that the ability to engage in flexible and effective partner choice behavior can be traced back to early childhood. Specifically, across two studies, we demonstrate that by 3 years of age, children identify effective communication as "helpful" (Experiments 1 & 2), reward good communicators with information (Experiment 1), and selectively reciprocate communication with diverse cooperative acts (Experiment 2). Taken together, these results suggest that even in early childhood, humans take advantage of cooperative benefits, while mitigating free-rider risks, through appropriate partner choice behavior.

Developing a concept of choice

Our adult concept of choice is not a simple idea, but rather a complex set of beliefs about the causes of actions. These beliefs are situation-, individual- and culture-dependent, and are thus likely constructed through social learning. This chapter takes a rational constructivist approach to examining the development of a concept of choice in young children. Initially, infants' combine assumptions of rational agency with their capacity for statistical inference to reason about alternative possibilities for, and constraints on, action. Preschoolers' build on this basic understanding by integrating domain-specific causal knowledge of physical, biological, and psychological possibility into their appraisal of their own and others' ability to choose. However, preschoolers continue to view both psychological and social motivations as constraints on choice--for example, stating that one cannot choose to harm another, or to act against personal desires. It is not until later that children share the adult belief that choice mediates between conflicting motivations for action. The chapter concludes by suggesting avenues for future research--to better characterize conceptual changes in beliefs about choice, and to understand how such beliefs arise from children's everyday experiences.

Children's explanations of the intentions underlying others' behaviour

This study investigated developmental differences in children's explanations of the intentions underlying the behaviours of others, including behaviours that conflicted with their expectations. Children aged 6-13 and adults explained the intentions underlying their predictions of behaviour following stories with ambiguous, positive, and negative cues. Children were then presented with experimenter-provided conflicting behaviour and explained again. Results indicated that with no clear cues, children and adults had optimistic expectations. When cues were provided, participants across development provided explanations consistent with positive cues, but children under age 10 were reluctant to provide explanations consistent with negative cues, despite good recall. When explaining conflicting behaviour, people may hesitate to overlook suspicions of negative intent sometimes even in the face of good behaviour, and this reluctance may increase with age. Findings suggest we may all overcome an optimistic bias, but children under age 10 may struggle more to do so.

Understanding the adult moralist requires first understanding the child scientist

Children learn from people and about people simultaneously; that is, children consider evidentiary qualities of human actions which cross traditional domain boundaries. We propose that Knobe's moral asymmetries are a natural consequence of this learning process: the way “child scientists” gather evidence for causation, intention, and morality through early social experiences.

Young children use statistical sampling to infer the preferences of other people

Psychological scientists use statistical information to determine the workings of human behavior. We argue that young children do so as well. Over the course of a few years, children progress from viewing human actions as intentional and goal directed to reasoning about the psychological causes underlying such actions. Here, we show that preschoolers and 20-month-old infants can use statistical information-namely, a violation of random sampling-to infer that an agent is expressing a preference for one type of toy instead of another type of toy. Children saw a person remove five toys of one type from a container of toys. Preschoolers and infants inferred that the person had a preference for that type of toy when there was a mismatch between the sampled toys and the population of toys in the box. Mere outcome consistency, time spent with the toys, and positive attention toward the toys did not lead children to infer a preference. These findings provide an important demonstration of how statistical learning could underpin the rapid acquisition of early psychological knowledge.

Ten-month-old infants use prior information to identify an actor's goal

For adults, prior information about an individual's likely goals, preferences or dispositions plays a powerful role in interpreting ambiguous behavior and predicting and interpreting behavior in novel contexts. Across two studies, we investigated whether 10-month-old infants' ability to identify the goal of an ambiguous action sequence was facilitated by seeing prior instances in which the actor directly pursued and obtained her goal, and whether infants could use this prior information to understand the actor's behavior in a new context. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the goal preview impacted infants' subsequent action understanding, but only if the preview was delivered in the same room as the subsequent action sequence. Experiment 2 demonstrated that infants' failure to transfer prior goal information across situations arose from a change in the room per se and not other features of the task. Our results suggest that infants may use their understanding of simple actions as a leverage point for understanding novel or ambiguous actions, but that their ability to do so is limited to certain types of contextual changes.

Children's appraisal of moderately stressful situations

This study investigated 2 questions: (1) do children show consistent styles of appraisal across a range of moderately stressful events?, and (2) what are the adjustment and parenting correlates of individual differences in children's appraisal style? Ninety-nine 3rd though 5th grade children and their mothers participated. For each of 6 vignettes involving moderately stressful situations, children responded to 10 items assessing children's appraisal of these events. Mothers completed a self-report measure of parenting practices and children reported on their psychological adjustment. Participants showed moderate levels of consistency in their appraisal of the events across situations, and 6 appraisal styles were identified that reflected the nature of appraisal aggregated across situations. These styles showed meaningful patterns of association with child psychological symptoms and parenting practices. Children showing the victim appraisal style reported the highest levels of anxiety and school dislike, whereas children showing the inconvenience and take responsibility styles reported the lowest level of conduct problems. Parenting style was associated with the appraisal style of boys but not girls. Specifically, boys of authoritative mothers were more likely than other boys to show the inconvenience and take responsibility appraisal styles and less likely to show the victim style.

Judgments of the lucky across development and culture

For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person. Rather, an individual's own intended, deliberate actions should be the basis of his or her evaluation, reward, and punishment. In a series of studies, the authors investigated whether such rules guide the judgments of children. The first 3 studies demonstrated that children view lucky others as more likely than unlucky others to perform intentional good actions. Children similarly assess the siblings of lucky others as more likely to perform intentional good actions than the siblings of unlucky others. The next 3 studies demonstrated that children as young as 3 years believe that lucky people are nicer than unlucky people. The final 2 studies found that Japanese children also demonstrate a robust preference for the lucky and their associates. These findings are discussed in relation to M. J. Lerner's (1980) just-world theory and J. Piaget's (1932/1965) immanent-justice research and in relation to the development of intergroup attitudes.