Developmental Changes and Individual Differences in Young Children’s Moral Judgments

Perceived contact with friends from lower socioeconomic status reduces exclusion based on social class

This study investigated children's and adolescents' reasoning about intergroup exclusion based on social class from educational opportunities in Türkiye. The role of children's and adolescents' perceived contact with friends from different socioeconomic backgrounds on their evaluations of exclusion and personal solutions to the exclusion was also examined. Participants (N = 270) included 142 children (8-10 years old, Mage = 9.80; SD = 0.82; 53.5% girls) and 128 adolescents (14-16 years old, Mage = 15.46; SD = 0.91, 61.7% girls) from lower (N = 144) and higher (N = 126) socioeconomic backgrounds. Results showed that while most participants viewed social class-based exclusion as wrong, adolescents were more likely to view it as wrong than were children. Adolescents from lower SES approached social class-based exclusion as less acceptable than did adolescents from higher SES who referred to expectations about conformity to authority and the status quo. Moderation analyses showed that for adolescents from higher SES, higher perceived contact with friends from lower SES was associated with decreased acceptability of exclusion and increased motivation to provide equity. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Overall, adolescents living in a country with economic instability evaluated social class-based exclusion from educational opportunities among peers as unfair and wrong. Adolescents from lower SES viewed social class-based exclusion as less acceptable than did adolescents from higher SES. Adolescents from higher SES expected that excluders' intentions were motivated by conforming to authority and supporting the status quo more frequently than did children. For adolescents from higher SES, perceived contact with friends from lower SES was associated with decreased acceptability of exclusion and increased motivation to provide equity.

Young children with higher verbal intelligence are less likely to cheat

Cheating is a pervasive unethical behavior. Existing research involving young children has mainly focused on contextual factors affecting cheating behavior, whereas cognitive factors have been relatively understudied. This study investigated the unique role of verbal and performance intelligence on young children's cheating behavior (N = 50; mean age = 5.73 years; 25 boys). Bootstrapping hierarchical logistic regression showed that children's Verbal IQ scores were significantly and negatively correlated with their cheating behavior above and beyond the contributions of age, gender, and Performance IQ scores. Children with higher Verbal IQ scores were less inclined to cheat. However, neither children's Performance IQ nor their Total IQ scores had a significant and unique correlation with cheating. These findings suggest that intelligence plays a significant role in children's cheating but that this role is limited to verbal intelligence only. In addition, this study highlights the need for researchers to go beyond the contextual factors to study the early development of cheating behavior.

The association between peer rejection and aggression types: A meta-analysis

BACKGROUND

Although previous studies have assessed the association between peer rejection and aggression, the results are mixed.

OBJECTIVE

This article presents a meta-analysis of the association between peer rejection and aggression types (overt vs. relational) among children and adolescents.

PARTICIPANTS AND SETTING

A total of 61 eligible studies with 70 independent effect sizes were included in the analysis (45,966 participants, M_age = 10.34, SD = 3.13).

METHODS

First, random-effects meta-analyses were conducted to explore the association between peer rejection and aggression types (overt vs. relational). Next, moderation analyses were conducted based on the Q statistics for categorical variables (culture, reporting method of peer rejection, reporting method of aggression) and the meta-regression analyses for continuous variable (age).

RESULTS

Peer rejection was positively correlated with overall aggression (r = 0.42, 95 % CI [0.38, 0.47], p < 0.001), overt aggression (r = 0.46, 95 % CI [0.38, 0.54], p < 0.001) and relational aggression (r = 0.43, 95 % CI [0.35, 0.51], p < 0.001). This correlation was positive for each type when controlling for other form of aggression. Moderation analyses suggested that reporting method of aggression (self-report vs. peer-nomination vs. adult-report vs. observation), reporting method of peer rejection (self-report vs. peer-nomination vs. adult-report) and culture (collectivist vs. individualist) were moderators of the association between peer rejection and overall aggression. Culture moderated the association between peer rejection and overt aggression, while age moderated the association between peer rejection and relational aggression.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings showed a strong positive association between peer rejection and aggression, although this association varied by aggression type and other moderating variables.

The Development of Disgust and Its Relationship to Adolescent Psychosocial Functioning

Experiences of excessive disgust have been implicated in several psychopathologies. Research, however, has rarely examined disgust and its role in psychosocial functioning from a developmental standpoint. This study examines the relationship between disgust expression in early life and subsequent adolescent psychosocial functioning. Data from 165 children were collected as part of a longitudinal study. Disgust propensity in infancy and childhood was assessed using a facial expressivity task and food aversion task, respectively. Adolescent psychosocial functioning was measured through several self-report measures. Results suggest that there exists a degree of consistency in disgust expression within the first year of life, and that childhood disgust propensity may be related to impairment in early adolescent psychosocial functioning. These findings highlight the potential importance of identifying early disgust expression as a marker for later psychopathology.

Give and take: A microgenetic study of preschoolers' deceptive and prosocial behavior in relation to their socio-cognitive development

Early on, young children begin to learn the social skills which will help them navigate through an increasingly complex social world. We explored how deceiving for personal gain potentially interacts with sharing the resulting resources and how they both relate to theory of mind (ToM) and inhibitory control in 3- to 5-year-old children (N = 92, 43 girls). Children played a hide-and-seek zero-sum game in which they could win stickers if they discovered how to deceive the experimenter. Then they were prompted to share their stickers in a dictator game paradigm. Using a microgenetic design, we tracked deceptive behavior across ten sessions and sharing behavior across five of these sessions, plus a follow-up session 15 months later. Children polarized into a group who never deceived across all sessions, and a group who constantly deceived above chance levels (around 85 % of the time). Sharing behavior was extremely low (under 6 % of stickers) across the sessions. At follow-up, deceptive behavior was above 80 %, while sharing remained at a low level (under 5 %). The novelty of our findings was that children who initially discovered how to deceive shared less than the children who didn't use this deceptive strategy. Nonetheless, this pattern was reversed at follow-up. Furthermore, ToM positively predicted deceptive behavior across all sessions and improved after the microgenetic sessions but wasn't related with deception at follow-up. Implications for enabling children to deploy the growing understanding of their worlds in a more prosocial way are discussed.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of associations between self-regulation and morality in preschool and elementary school children

The importance of self-regulatory skills for the socio-emotional competencies of children is being researched and discussed extensively. However, in order to make a clear statement about the impact of self-regulation on children’s morality, a systematic review of the literature is urgently needed. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to analyze associations between self-regulation and morality of preschool and elementary school children. In this context, distinctions among different definitions and operationalizations of self-regulation and morality are considered. Search terms were entered in the bibliographic databases PsycINFO, Scopus and Web of Science. To meet the inclusion criterion, studies needed to report empirical associations between self-regulation and morality in children of preschool and elementary school age. Furthermore, the studies should report primary data and be published in English in a peer-reviewed journal. Studies with secondary or summarized data, special populations or with certain designs were excluded. A total of 37 studies were included in the narrative synthesis. 35 of these studies were included in the meta-analysis. The narrative synthesis showed that different definitions and operationalizations were used for both self-regulation and morality. There also seems to be no consensus regarding the association between the constructs. Meta-analysis results revealed a small positive combined effect between self-regulation and morality, especially between temperament-related self-regulation and moral behavior and moral emotions. In order to gain a better understanding of the effects of self-regulation on morality, longitudinal research and further research addressing different forms of these constructs are essential.

Children’s Perspectives on Fairness and Inclusivity in the Classroom

School represents an important context for children’s social, moral, and identity development. Research indicates that supportive teacher-student relationships are significantly related to positive student academic achievement. Unfortunately, teacher bias as well as peer exclusion based on group identity (gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality) pervade many school contexts. The presence of these biases in the classroom is negatively related to students’ academic development, especially for children who are minoritized and marginalized. Very little research has connected teacher bias and children’s reasoning about bias and inequalities in the classroom context. The classroom is a complex environment in which to examine children’s social and moral reasoning about bias, given teachers’ position of authority which often includes power, status, and prestige. We propose that understanding both teacher bias and peer intergroup exclusion are essential for promoting more fair classrooms. This paper reviews foundational theory as well as the social reasoning developmental model as a framework for studying how children think about fairness and bias in the classroom context. We then discuss current research on children’s social-cognitive and moral capacities, particularly in the contexts of societal inequality and social inclusion or exclusion. Finally, this article proposes new directions for research to promote fairness and inclusivity in schools and suggests how these new lines of research might inform school-based interventions.

Moral Reasoning Enables Developmental and Societal Change

Moral reasoning is an essential part of how humans develop and a fundamental aspect of how human societies change over time. On a developmental timescale, reasoning about interpersonal disagreements and dilemmas spurs age-related changes in moral judgments from childhood to adulthood. When asked to distribute resources among others, even young children strive to balance competing concerns with equality, merit, and need. Over the course of development, reasoning and judgments about resource distribution and other moral issues become increasingly sophisticated. From childhood to adulthood, individuals not only evaluate acts as right or wrong but also take the extra steps to rectify inequalities, protest unfair norms, and resist stereotypic expectations about others. The development of moral reasoning also enables change on a societal timescale. Across centuries and communities, ordinary individuals have called for societal change based on moral concerns with welfare, rights, fairness, and justice. Individuals have effectively employed reasoning to identify and challenge injustices. In this article, we synthesize recent insights from developmental science about the roles of moral reasoning in developmental and societal change. In the concluding section, we turn to questions for future research on moral reasoning and change.

Toddlers' expectations of third-party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression

Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21-month-olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple puppet shows and were tested using the violation-of-expectation paradigm. In Experiment 1, we found that infants looked longer when they saw a bystander puppet punishing the puppet who defended the victim rather than the puppet who did not defend her. This pattern of looking times was reversed when the punishing action was replaced with a rewarding action (Experiment 2). These findings reveal early-emerging expectations about punitive and reward motivations in third-party contexts, and provide some support for theoretical claims about the hardwiring of the human mind for cooperation and prosociality.

Bilingual children judge moral, social, and language violations as less transgressive than monolingual children

Learning the rules and expectations that govern our social interactions is one of the major challenges of development. The current study examined whether bilingualism is associated with differences in children's developing social knowledge. We presented 54 4- to 6-year-old monolingual and bilingual children with vignettes of moral transgressions (e.g., hitting), social transgressions (e.g., wearing pants on one's head), and language transgressions (e.g., calling a common object by a nonsense word) and asked about their permissibility. In line with previous research findings, results demonstrate that all children evaluated moral violations more harshly than conventional violations. Notably, however, bilingual children were more permissive of violations across moral, social, and language domains than monolingual children. These findings yield new insights into the role of early experience in the development of social knowledge. We propose that bilinguals' unique linguistic and social experiences influence their understanding of moral and conventional rules.

Moral Reasoning about Aggressive Behavior in Relation to Type of Aggression, Age and Gender in South Korean Pupils

Studies of moral reasoning in relation to aggressive behaviors have paid limited attention to different types of aggression, and have mainly been conducted in Western societies. We describe findings from a study of 157 children, aged 6 or 11 years, from two schools in South Korea. Using a cartoon scenario methodology, we assessed moral reasoning about eight types of aggression: verbal, physical individual, physical group, social exclusion, rumor spreading, breaking one’s belongings, sending a nasty text via mobile phone, and sending a nasty message/email via computer. Four aspects of moral reasoning were assessed: moral judgment, harmfulness, reason for judgment, and causal responsibility. Many significant differences by type of aggression were found, especially for social exclusion (seen as less wrong and harmful, and more the victim’s responsibility), physical group aggression (seen as more wrong or harmful, and a matter of fairness, especially in older children and boys), and cyber aggression (seen more as the aggressor’s responsibility). Older children gave more reasons based on welfare, and fewer “don’t know” responses for reasons and attributions. Gender differences were relatively few, but girls did make more use of welfare in the moral reasoning domain. Findings are discussed in relation to previous research and the cultural context in South Korea.

App-based learning for kindergarten children at home (Learning4Kids): study protocol for cohort 1 and the kindergarten assessments

Background

Children’s literacy and mathematical competencies are a critical platform for their successful functioning as individuals in society. However, many children, in particular those with low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds who may not receive the home support needed to develop to their full potential, are at risk of not reaching sufficient competence levels. The overall aim of this project is to develop innovative computer tablet applications (‘apps’) and test whether the apps support parents in the provision of high-quality home learning environments (HLEs) and impact positively on the short- and long-term development of children’s competencies.

Altogether, “App-based learning for kindergarten children at home” (Learning4Kids) is a 5-year longitudinal study funded by the EU and designed to assess the potential impact of a tablet-based family intervention on children’s learning, development, social inclusion and well-being.

Methods/design

This study uses a multi-method intervention approach and draws on expertise from psychology, education, informatics, and didactics to evaluate the effectiveness of learning apps and the intervention approach. It also exploits new technological possibilities afforded by tablet computers that are very common nowadays in families. Learning4Kids sets out to measure the quality of the HLE, children’s early mathematical, literacy, and cognitive competencies and their behaviour. Here, data will be gathered via standardized tests, observations, and parental and educator surveys and checklists. Data collection also includes the assessment of app usage times via mobile sensing. In cohort 1, 190 families are assigned to one of four groups. One business-as-usual group will only participate in the child assessments, whereas the three remaining groups are provided with tablets for about 10 months. Two intervention groups will receive mathematical or literacy learning apps as well as parental information about these topics and the tablet-control-group will receive similar apps and information that focus on general child development, but not on mathematics or literacy.

Discussion

Whilst offering substantive advances for the scientific fields of psychology and education, the Learning4Kids study also has broad societal implications. Improving young children’s learning trajectories is both a social and economic imperative as it equips them to achieve greater individual success and to contribute to societal prosperity.

Conscience and theory of mind in children aged 4 to 7 years

Associations between three dimensions of early conscience-moral reasoning, the capacity to experience guilt, and the moral self-and theory of mind (ToM) were examined in children aged 4-7 years (N = 80). Participants were administered a task assessing their understanding of the intentions and actions of a transgressor in situations entailing intentional and accidental wrongdoing, a moral self scale, and a battery of first-order and second-order false belief tasks. Children's capacity to experience guilt was measured via parent report. Expressive vocabulary was also measured. Repeated-measures analysis of covariance with ToM, age, and their interaction as covariates revealed that children who had higher ToM scores attributed more positive intentions to the accidental transgressor than to the intentional transgressor and judged the intentional transgressor's action as more wrongful than children who scored lower on these tasks. Ηierarchical regression analyses also indicated that a more advanced ToM performance predicted higher levels of guilt and the moral self after accounting for age and expressive vocabulary.

Social evaluation and imitation of prosocial and antisocial agents in infants, children, and adults

The question of whether infants prefer prosocial agents over antisocial agents is contentious. Therefore, the first goal of the present study was to replicate previous findings regarding infants' preference. The second goal was to assess whether infants are more likely to imitate a prosocial agent than an antisocial agent. We tested 9-month-old, 14-month-old, and 4-year-old children. The study used the "opening a box to get a toy" paradigm in which an animal puppet is trying unsuccessfully to open a box and is either helped by a prosocial puppet or hindered by an antisocial puppet. We presented these social events via video, and subsequently administered an imitation task. As an additional control, adults were asked to describe the videos showing the prosocial and antisocial agent. Although most adults were able to identify both agents, the three age groups of children did not prefer the prosocial agent over the antisocial agent, and were not more likely to imitate the prosocial agent. The lack of differences might be explained by methodological issues or by a lack of robustness of the effect.

The Homogeneity and Heterogeneity of Moral Functioning in Preschool

The current study examined relations between distinct aspects of moral functioning, and their cognitive and emotional correlates, in preschool age children. Participants were 171 typically developing 3- to 6-year-olds. Each child completed several tasks, including (a) moral tasks assessing both performance of various moral actions and evaluations of moral scenarios presented both verbally and nonverbally; and (b) non-moral tasks assessing general cognitive skill, executive functioning, theory-of-mind, and emotion recognition. Shyness and empathic concern were assessed from video acquired during participation. Results demonstrated positive associations among distinct moral actions, as well as among distinct moral evaluation tasks, but few associations between tasks assessing moral actions and moral evaluation. Empathic concern and inhibitory control each emerged as important predictors of preschoolers' moral functioning.

Young Children's Judgments and Reasoning about Prosocial Acts: Impermissible, Suberogatory, Obligatory, or Supererogatory?

In deciding when to help, individuals reason about whether prosocial acts are impermissible, suberogatory, obligatory, or supererogatory. This research examined judgments and reasoning about prosocial actions at three to five years of age, when explicit moral judgments and reasoning are emerging. Three-to five-year-olds (N = 52) were interviewed about prosocial actions that varied in costs/benefits to agents/recipients, agent-recipient relationship, and recipient goal valence. Children were also interviewed about their own prosocial acts. Adults (N = 56) were interviewed for comparison. Children commonly judged prosocial actions as obligatory. Overall, children were more likely than adults to say that agents should help. Children's judgments and reasoning reflected concerns with welfare as well as agent and recipient intent. The findings indicate that 3-to 5-year-olds make distinct moral judgments about prosocial actions, and that judgments and reasoning about prosocial acts subsequently undergo major developments.

The moral obligations of conflict and resistance

Morality has two key features: (1) moral judgments are not solely determined by what your group thinks, and (2) moral judgments are often applied to members of other groups as well as your own group. Cooperative motives do not explain how young children reject unfairness, and assert moral obligations, both inside and outside their groups. Resistance and experience with conflicts, alongside cooperation, is key to the emergence and development of moral obligation.

Constraints on conventions: Resolving two puzzles of conventionality

Conventions play a fundamental, yet contested, role in social reasoning from childhood to adulthood. Conventions about how to eat, dress, speak, or play are often said to be alterable, contingent on authorities or consensus, specific to contexts, and-thereby-distinct from moral concerns. This view of conventional norms has faced two puzzles. Children and adults judge that (a) some conventions should not be adopted and (b) some violations of conventions would be wrong even if the conventions were removed. The puzzles derive, in part, from the notion of "pure" conventions: conventions detached from non-conventional concerns. This paper proposes and examines a novel solution to the two puzzles, termed the constraint view. According to the constraint view, children and adults deem conventions as alterable within constraints imposed by non-conventional concerns. The present research focused on constraints imposed by concerns with agents to whom the norms apply and concerns with others affected by the norms. Findings from four studies with preschoolers and adults supported the constraint view. Participants evaluated actions and norms based on concerns with effects on agents and others, deeming conventions to be alterable insofar as the altered norms did not negatively impact agents or others. The constraint view offers a new framework for research on how children and adults integrate conventional and non-conventional concerns when they evaluate norms and acts.

Children's moral judgments about psychological harm: Links among harm salience, victims' vulnerability, and child sympathy

This study examined 106 5- and 6-year-olds' (M = 5.84 years, SD = 0.62) judgments and justifications about psychological harm (e.g., acts such as teasing or excluding others) assessed in three experimental harm salience conditions (highly salient harm, less salient harm, and no harm) crossed with two victims' vulnerability conditions (typical child and vulnerable child). We also examined interactions between these features and parent and child ratings of sympathy. Children evaluated highly salient harm as more unacceptable, more punishable, and more wrong independent of authority and as resulting in victims' more negative emotions than less salient harm and, in turn, no harm. Children reasoned about others' welfare most for highly salient harm stories, whereas children reasoned about less salient harm stories as involving moral and non-moral concerns. In considering victims' vulnerability, children evaluated harm done to typical victims as more wrong than harm done to vulnerable victims. Higher levels of child-reported sympathy were associated with ratings of transgressions as more unacceptable and wrong independent of authority, but only for less salient harm stories. The results demonstrate children's ability to incorporate different features of psychological harm into their moral judgments and highlight the importance of child sympathy in their understanding of more nuanced forms of harm.

Using naturalistic recordings to study children's social perceptions and evaluations

Children often encounter events that bear on their moral and other evaluations, such as physical aggression and material disorder. Children's perceptions and evaluations are decisive for how they respond to and learn from these everyday events. Using a new method for investigating the development of social perceptions and evaluations, researchers interviewed 3- to 6-year-olds about naturalistic video recordings of harm, disorder, and joint play events. Children distinguished between the situations in the perceived intent of the protagonists, evaluations, justifications, and what they thought the protagonist should do after. Age differences suggested that perceiving and evaluating simple everyday situations was challenging for younger children. This research highlights the importance of studying children's everyday social perceptions and evaluations and validates a new paradigm for doing so. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Toddlers and infants expect individuals to refrain from helping an ingroup victim's aggressor

Adults and older children are more likely to punish a wrongdoer for a moral transgression when the victim belongs to their group. Building on these results, in violation-of-expectation experiments (n = 198), we examined whether 2.5-year-old toddlers (Exps. 1 and 2) and 1-year-old infants (Exps. 3 and 4) would selectively expect an individual in a minimal group to engage in third-party punishment (TPP) for harm to an ingroup victim. We focused on an indirect form of TPP, the withholding of help. To start, children saw a wrongdoer steal a toy from a victim while a bystander watched. Next, the wrongdoer needed assistance with a task, and the bystander either helped or hindered her. The group memberships of the wrongdoer and the victim were varied relative to that of the bystander and were marked with either novel labels (Exps. 1 and 2) or novel outfits (Exps. 3 and 4). When the victim belonged to the same group as the bystander, children expected TPP: At both ages, they detected a violation when the bystander chose to help the wrongdoer. Across experiments, this effect held whether the wrongdoer belonged to the same group as the bystander and the victim or to a different group; it was eliminated when the victim belonged to a different group than the bystander, when groups were not marked, and when either no theft occurred or the wrongdoer was unaware of the theft. Toddlers and infants thus expect individuals to refrain from helping an ingroup victim's aggressor, providing further evidence for an early-emerging expectation of ingroup support.

The Science of Early Moral Development: on Defining, Constructing, and Studying Morality from Birth

The first 4 years of moral development are perhaps the most transformative. Helpless neonates become infants who routinely help and harm others; infants develop into preschoolers who make moral judgments based on moral concerns with welfare. Over the past two decades, there has been tremendous empirical progress, but also theoretical stalemates, in research on early moral development. To advance the field, this chapter argues for providing definitions of key terms, adopting an interactionist and constructivist approach (eschewing the dichotomy between innate and learned characteristics), and combining naturalistic and experimental methods. On this basis, the chapter reviews research on how children's orientations toward helping and harming others develop gradually through everyday social interactions in the early years. In these interactions, children play active roles through initiation, negotiation, protest, and construction. The chapter concludes with key questions for future research on early moral development.

Self-Reported Moral Emotions and Physical and Relational Aggression in Early Childhood: A Social Domain Approach

This study examined discrepancies between 4- and 7-year-olds' (n = 135; M_age  = 5.65) self-reported affect following hypothetical moral versus social-conventional transgressions and their associations with teacher-rated physical and relational aggression concurrently and 9-months later. Negative emotion ratings in response to prototypical moral transgressions were not associated with children's aggression. When transgressions were described as no longer prohibited by rules and authority figures, children reporting more negative affect in response to moral as compared to conventional violations were less physically aggressive at Wave 1 and showed relative and mean-level declines in physical aggression over time. Relational aggression was not associated with self-reported emotions. Findings indicate the importance of distinguishing between types of transgressions and forms of aggression in studying moral emotions.

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.

Effort or outcome? Children's meritorious decisions

How individuals determine what is fair and just when allocating resources is a fundamental aspect of moral development. Decisions about fairness involve considerations such as merit, which includes effort (one's own exertion to achieve a goal) and outcome (one's product). Previous research has described merit in terms of both effort and outcome (e.g., a meritorious individual is both hard-working and productive). Crucially, no research has documented whether children give priority to being hard-working (high effort) or to being productive (high outcome or product) when allocating resources. This gap in the literature obfuscates two constructs that reflect how individuals allocate resources. The current study examined this process by which children (3- to 10-year-olds, N = 100; M_age = 7.27 years, SD = 2.39) weighed these two different aspects of merit in their fairness decisions in several situations where levels of effort and outcome were varied. When there was a discrepancy between effort and outcome, children increasingly prioritized effort over outcome with age and allocated more resources to hard-working peers than to productive peers. Effort and outcome were also examined. In situations where only effort varied (i.e., outcome was controlled), with age children were more likely to incorporate effort into their fairness decisions; however, in situations where only outcome varied (i.e., effort was controlled), with age children were less likely to incorporate effort into their fairness decisions. Taken together, the findings suggest that as children get older, they increasingly focus on effort of individuals rather than on their productivity when distributing resources.

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.

New Beginnings: An Interactionist and Constructivist Approach to Early Moral Development

Orientations toward harming and helping others are central to morality. These orientations undergo major transformations in early life. This paper proposes an interactionist and constructivist approach to early moral development, and discusses how children construct orientations toward harming and helping through everyday social interactions. A major developmental acquisition - typically evident by age three - is the ability to make judgments of right and wrong based on concerns with others' welfare. The paper concludes by outlining issues for future research on the development of morality from infancy to childhood.

A Developmental Perspective on the Origins of Morality in Infancy and Early Childhood

Key constituents of morality emerge during the first 4 years of life. Recent research with infants and toddlers holds a promise to explain the origins of human morality. This article takes a constructivist approach to the acquisition of morality, and makes three main proposals. First, research on moral development needs an explicit definition of morality. Definitions are crucial for scholarly communication and for settling empirical questions. Second, researchers would benefit from eschewing the dichotomy between innate and learned explanations of morality. Based on work on developmental biology, we propose that all developmental transitions involve both genetic and environmental factors. Third, attention is needed to developmental changes, alongside continuities, in the development of morality from infancy through childhood. Although infants and toddlers show behaviors that resemble the morally relevant behaviors of older children and adults, they do not judge acts as morally right or wrong until later in childhood. We illustrate these points by discussing the development of two phenomena central to morality: Orientations toward helping others and developing concepts of social equality. We assert that a constructivist approach will help to bridge research on infants and toddlers with research on moral developmental later in childhood and into adulthood.

Are young children's preferences and evaluations of moral and conventional transgressors associated with domain distinctions in judgments?

The current study investigated associations between children's preferences and evaluations of moral and social-conventional transgressors in a novel puppet task and their links with explicit judgments in a standard interview. Children aged 2-3.25 years (M = 2.53 years, SD = 0.35) and 3.5-5 years (M = 4.38 years, SD = 0.52) watched two pairs of live puppet shows depicting actors committing a moral transgression and a conventional transgression and chose which transgressor they liked more, preferred more as a friend, thought was more wrong, and should get in more trouble; they also distributed resources to the transgressors. At both ages, children allocated fewer resources to moral transgressors than to conventional transgressors, but younger children's other responses did not exceed chance levels. In contrast, older children chose the moral transgressor as more wrong, more deserving of punishment, and less likeable. Preferences were associated with evaluations in the puppet task, particularly among older children. In contrast, all children differentiated between moral and conventional transgressions in their explicit judgments, with age differences found only in rule independence. More mature moral judgments, as assessed by latent difference scores reflecting moral-conventional distinctions, were associated with preferring to befriend the conventional transgressor and evaluating the moral transgressor as more wrong. Together, these results show age-related increases in children's moral understanding of-and stronger associations between-preferences and evaluations with age.

Preschool Children Transfer Real-World Moral Reasoning into Pretense

Is it wrong to pretend to kick or pretend to steal? The current experiment examined whether preschoolers extend their moral principles from reality into pretense and whether this transfer depends on the proximity of the pretend world to the real world. Children are known to transfer their knowledge of object properties, causality, and problem solutions between pretend and real worlds. However, do children maintain their real-world moral reasoning in pretense? Preschoolers (N = 63) judged the acceptability of antisocial behaviors in pretend, fantastical, or non-pretend scenarios. Children found antisocial behaviors to be equally unacceptable in both pretend and non-pretend situations but found antisocial behaviors to be more acceptable in the fantastical situations. These results imply that children extend their real-world representations of morality in pretense, but more so for pretend scenarios that are similar to the real world. Implications for children's understanding of the reality-fantasy boundary and moral reasoning are discussed.

Neural correlates of conventional and harm/welfare-based moral decision-making

The degree to which social norms are processed by a unitary system or dissociable systems remains debated. Much research on children's social-cognitive judgments has supported the distinction between "moral" (harm/welfare-based) and "conventional" norms. However, the extent to which these norms are processed by dissociable neural systems remains unclear. To address this issue, 23 healthy participants were scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they rated the wrongness of harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions and neutral vignettes. Activation significantly greater than the neutral vignette baseline was observed in regions implicated in decision-making regions including rostral/ventral medial frontal, anterior insula and dorsomedial frontal cortices when evaluating both harm/welfare-based and social-conventional transgressions. Greater activation when rating harm/welfare-based relative to social-conventional transgressions was seen through much of ACC and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus. Greater activation was observed in superior temporal gyrus, bilateral middle temporal gyrus, left PCC, and temporal-parietal junction when rating social-conventional transgressions relative to harm/welfare-based transgressions. These data suggest that decisions regarding the wrongness of actions, irrespective of whether they involve care/harm-based or conventional transgressions, recruit regions generally implicated in affect-based decision-making. However, there is neural differentiation between harm/welfare-based and conventional transgressions. This may reflect the particular importance of processing the intent of transgressors of conventional norms and perhaps the greater emotional content or salience of harm/welfare-based transgressions.

Children's recognition of fairness and others' welfare in a resource allocation task: Age related changes

The present study investigated age-related changes regarding children's (N = 136) conceptions of fairness and others' welfare in a merit-based resource allocation paradigm. To test whether children at 3- to 5-years-old and 6- to 8-years-old took others' welfare into account when dividing resources, in addition to merit and equality concerns, children were asked to allocate, judge, and reason about allocations of necessary (needed to avoid harm) and luxury (enjoyable to have) resources to a hardworking and a lazy character. While 3- to 5-year-olds did not differentiate between distributing luxury and necessary resources, 6- to 8-year-olds allocated luxury resources more meritoriously than necessary resources. Further, children based their allocations of necessary resources on concerns for others' welfare, rather than merit, even when one character was described as working harder. The findings revealed that, with age, children incorporated the concerns for others' welfare and merit into their conceptions of fairness in a resource allocation context, and prioritized these concerns differently depending on whether they were allocating luxury or necessary resources. Further, with age, children weighed multiple moral concerns including equality, merit, and others' welfare, when determining the fair allocation of resources. (PsycINFO Database Record

Young Children's Moral Judgments, Justifications, and Emotion Attributions in Peer Relationship Contexts

Children (n = 160, 4- to 9-year-olds; M_age  = 6.23 years, SD = 1.46) judged, justified, attributed emotions, and rated intent for hypothetical physical harm, psychological harm, and resource distribution transgressions against close friends, acquaintances, disliked peers, or bullies. Transgressions against bullies were judged more acceptable than against friends and disliked peers and less deserving of punishment than against acquaintances and disliked peers. Transgressions against friends were judged least intended and resulting in more negative emotions for transgressors; actors transgressing against disliked peers, as compared to bullies or acquaintances, were happy victimizers. Across relationships, children viewed moral transgressions as wrong independent of rules and authority, based primarily on welfare and fairness justifications. Peer context colors but does not fundamentally change moral evaluations.

Domain Specificity in Adolescents' Concepts of Laws: Associations Among Beliefs and Behavior

Using detailed vignettes and scale measures, concepts of laws regulating domain-specific issues and engagement in delinquency were assessed among 340 9th through 12th graders (M_age = 16.64, SD = 1.37). Adolescents distinguished between laws that regulate moral, drug-related prudential, conventional, personal, and multifaceted issues in their criterion judgments and justifications. Youths' ratings of the importance of laws, obligation to obey laws, and deserved punishment for breaking different laws also followed domain-consistent patterns. Adolescents' engagement in moral, drug-related prudential, and multifaceted forms of delinquency was associated with less supportive judgments about laws within the same domain. Findings contribute to civic development research by demonstrating domain specificity in adolescents' beliefs about laws and suggest that these beliefs are linked with engagement in similar types of delinquency.

Group presence, category labels, and generic statements influence children to treat descriptive group regularities as prescriptive

Children use descriptive regularities of social groups (what is) to generate prescriptive judgments (what should be). We examined whether this tendency held when the regularities were introduced through group presence, category labels, or generic statements. Children (ages 4-9years, N=203) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions that manipulated how descriptive group regularities were presented: group presence (e.g., "These ones [a group of three individuals] eat this kind of berry"), category labels (e.g., "This [individual] Hibble eats this kind of berry"), generic statements (e.g., [showing an individual] "Hibbles eat this kind of berry"), or control (e.g., "This one [individual] eats this kind of berry"). Then, children saw conforming and non-conforming individuals and were asked to evaluate their behavior. As predicted, children evaluated non-conformity negatively in all conditions except the control condition. Together, these results suggest that minimal perceptual and linguistic cues provoke children to treat social groups as having normative force.

Shared Book Reading Interactions Within Families From Low Socioeconomic Backgrounds and Children’s Social Understanding and Prosocial Behavior

The study explored the nature of mother–child conversation during and after a shared book reading (SBR) interaction and how it relates to children’s social understanding and prosocial behavior. Participants were 61 mother–child dyads (children’s mean age 5 years, 8 months) from low socioeconomic strata (SES). Mother–child SBR and their conversation following the reading were video-recorded. Children’s social understanding was evaluated via their ability to distinguish between social norms violations and moral violations. Prosocial behavior was evaluated through children’s sharing behavior. Results showed that during SBR, mothers and children from low SES tended to stick to the written text, whereas following the book reading, they elaborated beyond the explicit aspects of the text. Furthermore, references to socioemotional issues during mother–child conversation correlated with the child’s social understanding and prosocial behavior, beyond the child’s vocabulary level.