The development of intention-based sociomoral judgment and distribution behavior from a third-party stance

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Beyond accidents: Young children's forgiveness of third-party intentional transgressors

To maintain our cooperative relationships, it is critical that we repair these relationships when they are damaged by transgressions. Key to this repair is forgiveness. Previous research suggests that adults and children are more forgiving of remorseful transgressors than of unremorseful ones after accidental transgressions. However, little is known about whether children's forgiveness also takes the transgressors' intentions into account. Using a third-person video paradigm with children in the United States, Study 1 found that 6-year-olds (n = 20; 10 girls; 60% White) were more likely to negatively evaluate an intentional transgressor and give more resources to an accidental transgressor when both transgressors showed remorse, whereas 5-year-olds (n = 20; 10 girls; 80% White) showed this effect only in their resource distribution. Study 2 found that 6-year-olds (n = 18; 7 girls; 83% White) were more likely to positively evaluate and share more resources with a remorseful intentional transgressor than with an unremorseful intentional one. Thus, by school age in the United States, children's forgiveness, at least as bystanders, begins to take into account both the transgressor's intentions and the display of remorse.

Moral content influences facial emotion processing development during early-to-middle childhood

Facial emotions are often processed in light of moral information, which can assist in predicting and interpreting the intentions of another. Neurophysiological measures of facial emotion processing (FEP) may be sensitive to moral content. Relatively little is known, however, about the relationship between moral content and FEP during early-to-middle childhood, and how this relationship may change across development. Eighty-four children aged 4-12 years completed a task assessing whether child faces primed within the moral harm/care domain influenced face sensitive event-related potentials (ERPs; N170 and LPP). Results demonstrated that N170 amplitude decreased with age for faces primed with positive moral content, whilst LPP amplitude decreased with age for faces primed with negative moral content. Collectively, this suggests that morally relevant content within the harm/care domain is integrated during the early stages of FEP in early-to-middle childhood. Moreover, stronger language ability was positively correlated with the LPP for fearful faces primed with negative moral content. Overall, findings provide novel evidence to suggest that FEP development may be modulated by moral content, and emotion-specific results may be influenced by language. Findings from this research highlight the complex relationship between broader social cognitive skills during child development.

Children's Navigation of Contextual Cues in Peer Transgressions: The Role of Aggression Form, Transgressor Gender, and Transgressor Intention

When faced with transgressions in their peer groups, children must navigate a series of situational cues (e.g., type of transgression, transgressor gender, transgressor intentionality) to evaluate the moral status of transgressions and to inform their subsequent behavior toward the transgressors. There is little research on which cues children prioritize when presented together, how reliance on these cues may be affected by certain biases (e.g., gender norms), or how the prioritization of these cues may change with age. To explore these questions, 138 5- to 7-year-olds (younger children) and 8- to 10-year-olds (older children) evaluated a series of boy and girl characters who partook in physical or relational aggression with ambiguous or purposeful intent. Children were asked to provide sociomoral evaluations (i.e., acceptability, punishment, and intention attribution judgments) and social preferences. Transgressor gender only impacted children’s social preferences. Conversely, aggression form and transgressor intent shifted children’s sociomoral judgments: they were harsher toward physical transgressors with purposeful intent over those with ambiguous intent but made similar evaluations for relational transgressors regardless of intentionality. The present results suggest that gender is perhaps not uniformly relevant to children across all contexts, as other cues were prioritized for children’s sociomoral judgments. Since children likely have less familiarity with relational aggression compared to physical aggression, it follows that intent would only shift judgments about physical transgressors. This research provides insight about how children simultaneously navigate multiple cues in aggression contexts, which is likely reflective of their real-world experiences.

"There are no band-aids for emotions": The development of thinking about emotional harm

An understanding of harm is central to social and cognitive development, but harm largely has been conceptualized as physical damage or injury. Less research focuses on children's judgments of harm to others' internal well-being (emotional harms). We asked 5- to 10-year-old children (N = 456, 50% girls, 50% boys; primarily tested in Central New York, with socioeconomic diversity, but limited racial/ethnic or linguistic diversity) to compare emotional and physical harms. In Experiment 1, children compared simple harms (intended and completed) and then scenarios in which the perpetrator's intention did not match the outcome (intended emotional harm, but caused physical harm, or vice-versa). Assessments of the severity of emotional (vs. physical) harm increased with age and depended on the perpetrator's intentions. In Experiment 2, children saw emotional and physical harms that were: Simple (intended and completed); Incomplete (intended, but not completed); or Accidental (not intended, but completed). Children evaluated physical and emotional harms in isolation and then compared the two. Judgments of the relative severity of emotional harm increased with age, but only when intentions and outcomes were both present. This reflected an increase with age in children's perceptions that emotional harm was hurtful, whereas perceptions of physical harm were relatively stable across development. With age, children also increasingly associated emotional harms with longer-term impacts (being remembered and reoccurring). These findings suggest reasoning about the severity, underlying intentions, and duration of emotional harm shifts with age. The results hold implications for moral development, law and psychology, and emotional-harm-related interventions including those addressing bullying. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Partner in crime: Beneficial cooperation overcomes children's aversion to antisocial others

Young children display strong aversion toward antisocial individuals, but also feel responsible for joint activities and express a strong sense of group loyalty. This paper aims to understand how beneficial cooperation with an antisocial partner shapes preschoolers' attitudes, preferences, and moral judgments concerning antisocial individuals. We argue that although young children display a strong aversion to antisocial characters, children may overcome this aversion when they stand to personally benefit. In Study 1a (N = 62), beneficial cooperation with an antisocial partner resulted in the children's later preference for the antisocial partner over the neutral partner. Study 1b (N = 91) replicated this effect with discrete measurement of liking (resource distribution) and showed that children rewarded more and punished less the antisocial partner in the beneficial cooperation setting. In Study 2, (N = 58), children's aversion to an antisocial in-group member decreased when the cooperation benefited other in-group members. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 62), when children passively observed the antisocial individual, personal benefits from the antisocial behavior did not change their negative attitude toward the antisocial individual. Overall, beneficial cooperation with the antisocial partner increased the children's liking and preference for the antisocial partner, but did not affect the children's moral judgments. Presented evidence suggests that by the age of 4, children develop a strong obligation to collaborate with partners who help them to acquire resources-even when these partners harm third parties, which children recognize as immoral.

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.

He had it Comin': ERPs Reveal a Facilitation for the Processing of Misfortunes to Antisocial Characters

Human sociality and prosociality rely on social and moral feelings of empathy, compassion, envy, schadenfreude, as well as on the preference for prosocial over antisocial others. We examined the neural underpinnings of the processing of lexical input designed to tap into these type of social feelings. Brainwave responses from 20 participants were measured as they read sentences comprising a randomly delivered ending outcome (fortunate or unfortunate) to social agents previously profiled as prosocial or antisocial individuals. Fortunate outcomes delivered to prosocial and antisocial agents aimed to tap into empathy and envy/annoying feelings, respectively, whereas unfortunate ones into compassion for prosocial agents and schadenfreude for antisocial ones. ERP modulations in early attention-capture (100-200 ms), semantic fit (400 ms), and late reanalysis processes (600 ms) were analyzed. According to the functional interpretation of each of these event-related electrophysiological effects, we conclude that: 1) a higher capture of attention is initially obtained in response to any type of outcome delivered to a prosocial versus an antisocial agent (frontal P2); 2) a facilitated semantic processing occurs for unfortunate outcomes delivered to antisocial agents (N400); and 3) regardless of the protagonist's social profile, an increased later reevaluation for overall unfortunate versus fortunate outcomes takes place (Late Positive Potential). Thus, neural online measures capture a stepwise unfolding impact of social factors during language comprehension, which include a facilitated processing of misfortunes when they happen to occur to antisocial peers (i.e., schadenfreude).

The influence of intention and outcome on young children's reciprocal sharing

This study investigated the influence of underlying intentions and outcomes of a partner's sharing behavior on young children's reciprocity. We provided 3- and 5-year-old children with the opportunity to share with a partner following different treatments of a partner's intention (to share or not to share) that led to different outcomes (children got or did not get stickers from their partner). For the 3-year-olds, we found that the outcome of the previous interaction influenced how much they shared, whereas the intention of their partner affected how readily they initiated sharing in response to social cues. For the 5-year-olds, we found that both outcome and intention affected how much they shared as well as how readily they initiated sharing. This suggests that already 3-year-olds are able to take into account outcome and intention information separately in reciprocal sharing. However, only 5-year-olds can combine both to flexibly maintain social interactions without running the risk of being exploited by others.

Intention Attribution and the Development of Moral Evaluation

Research with infants and toddlers suggests that even early in development, humans evaluate others by considering the outcome of an action in relation to the intention underlying it. When someone tries but fails to do a good deed, for example, it seems that it is "the thought that counts." However, research with slightly older children in the preschool years has produced mixed results: in some cases, children are solely considering the positive or negative outcome of an action when evaluating others, while in others, intention attributions are integrated. Such contradictory findings have prompted debate about the development of moral reasoning. Here, we examine extant research on early moral evaluation and propose that differences in the way that task procedures present intention and outcome information can (1) support or preclude young children's intention attribution and (2) alter the relative saliency or predominance of each kind of information. In turn, these differences would influence the frequency and degree to which young children generate intention-oriented moral evaluations.

Preschoolers Focus on Others' Intentions When Forming Sociomoral Judgments

Many studies suggest that preschoolers initially privilege outcome over intention in their moral judgments. The present findings reveal that, in contrast, even younger preschoolers can privilege intentions when evaluating characters who successfully or unsuccessfully help or hinder a third party in achieving its goal. Following a live-action puppet show originally created for infant populations, children made a forced-choice social judgment (which puppet was liked) and two forced-choice moral judgments (which puppet was nicer, which puppet should be punished), and were asked to explain their punishment allocations. In two experiments (N = 195), 3- and 4-year-olds evaluated characters with distinct intentions to help or to hinder who were associated with either positive or negative outcomes. Both ages judged characters with more positive intentions as nicer, and allocated punishment to characters with more negative intentions; neither of these tendencies depended on the outcomes the characters were associated with. Three-year-olds’ responses were somewhat less consistent than were 4-year-olds’, in that 3-year-olds’ judgments were disrupted by ambiguous harmful intent. Notably, children’s social judgments were less consistent than their moral judgments. In a third and final experiment (N = 100), children evaluated characters with the same intention but who were associated with different outcomes. Children showed inconsistent responding across age and outcome valence, but only 4-year-olds evaluating two characters with positive intentions reliably responded based on outcome. When providing informative responses in all three studies, children most frequently explained their punishment allocations by appealing to the puppet’s (attempted) hindering action or failure to help. These findings raise questions as to what underlies different patterns of response across studies in the literature, and suggests that observing live interactions may facilitate young children’s intention-based moral judgments.