Counterfactual choices and moral judgments in children

The recursive grammar of mental time travel

One apparent feature of mental time travel is the ability to recursively embed temporal perspectives across different times: humans can remember how we anticipated the future and anticipate how we will remember the past. This recursive structure of mental time travel might be formalized in terms of a 'grammar' that is reflective of but more general than linguistic notions of absolute and relative tense. Here, I provide a foundation for this grammatical framework, emphasizing a bounded (rather than unbounded) recursive function that supports mental time travel to a limited temporal depth and to actual and possible scenarios. Anticipated counterfactual thinking, for instance, entails three levels of mental time travel to a possible scenario ('in the future, I will reflect on how my past self could have taken a different future action') and is centrally implicated in complex human decision-making. This perspective calls for further research into the mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny of recursive mental time travel, and revives the question of links with other recursive forms of thinking such as theory of mind. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Children's consideration of motivation in evaluations of socially (un)mindful actions

Previous research shows that both adults and children by 5 or 6 years of age appreciate socially mindful actions where one leaves a choice for others. However, less is known as to whether children consider motivations in their evaluations of socially (un)mindful actions. Here we investigated whether children and adults can spontaneously evaluate socially (un)mindful behaviors depending on contextual cues, specifically whether the actions happen in public or in private. We also investigated how children evaluate these actions when provided with explicit information on motivations. We presented 99 children (aged 6-11 years) and 99 adults in China with two characters performing the same socially mindful or unmindful behaviors. One character acted publicly, whereas the other acted privately. Participants were asked to compare the two characters first spontaneously and then again after explicit information on the characters' motivations was provided. We found that whereas adults spontaneously favor private socially mindful acts, children favor public socially mindful acts. Only after motivations were provided did children favor private socially mindful acts like adults. In addition, we found asymmetry in that motivation seems to matter more in evaluations of socially mindful actions than in evaluations of socially unmindful ones. These findings are the first to reveal children's consideration of motivations in their evaluations of socially mindful behaviors.

Choosing Among Undesirable Options: Children Consider Desirability of Available Choices in Evaluation of Socially Mindful Actions

Previous studies show that adults and children evaluate the act of leaving a choice for others as prosocial, and have termed such actions as socially mindful actions. The current study investigates how the desirability of the available options (i.e., whether the available options are desirable or not) may influence adults' and children's evaluation of socially mindful actions. Children (N = 120, 4- to 6-year-olds) and adults (N = 124) were asked to evaluate characters selecting items for themselves from a set of three items-two identical items and one unique item-in a way that either leaves a choice (two diverse items) or leaves no choice (two identical items) for the next person (i.e., the beneficiary). We manipulated whether the available options were either desirable or undesirable (i.e., damaged). We found that adults' and 6-year-olds' evaluation of socially mindful actions is moderated by the desirability of the options. Although they evaluate the act of leaving a choice for others as nicer than the act of leaving no choice both when the choosing options are desirable and when they are undesirable, the discrepancy in the evaluation becomes significantly smaller when the choosing options are undesirable. We also found that inference of the beneficiary's feeling underlies social evaluation of the actor leaving a choice (or not). These findings suggest that children consider both the diversity of options left and the desirability of the available options in understanding and evaluating socially mindful acts.

Young children experience both regret and relief in a gain-or-loss context

Recent research has provided compelling evidence that children experience the negative counterfactual emotion of regret, by manipulating the presence of a counterfactual action that would have led to participants receiving a better outcome. However, it remains unclear if children similarly experience regret's positive counterpart, relief. The current study examined children's negative and positive counterfactual emotions in a novel gain-or-loss context. Four- to 9-year-old children (N = 136) were presented with two opaque boxes concealing information that would lead to a gain or loss of stickers, respectively. Half of the children chose between two keys that matched each box, whereas the other half were compelled to select one box because only one of the two keys matched. After seeing inside the alternative, non-chosen box, children were significantly more likely to report a change in emotion when they could have opened that box than when they could not have. The effects were similar for children who lost stickers and won stickers, and neither effect varied with age. These findings suggest that children may become capable of experiencing regret and relief around the same time, although their expression of these counterfactual emotions may vary with actual and counterfactual gains and losses.

Why imagining what could have happened matters for children's social cognition

Counterfactual thinking is a relatively late emerging ability in childhood with key implications for emerging social cognition and behavior.