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.
Little research focuses on children's reasoning about people whose gender is perceived as uncertain. Five-to 8-year-olds viewed a target with a gender uncertain appearance. The target had trait or preference similarities with a character from a binary, specified gender (i.e., boy, girl) and appearance similarities with another character that had an uncertain gender. Half of the participants heard gender uncertainty labels (i.e., "We're not sure about this person. This person doesn't look like a boy or a girl.") or gender specification labels (i.e., "This person is a boy.") for each character. The remaining participants heard miscellaneous character information. Children inferred whether the target favored the same novel activity as the character with similar traits or preferences, but with a specified gender, or the gender uncertain character. Seven-and 8-year-olds made more trait-based predictions than 5-and 6-year-olds, but both age groups made unsystematic predictions in response to preferences, suggesting that some viewed preferences and others viewed gender as reflective of broader similarities among people in this context. A follow-up study with 5and 6-year-olds conveyed gender uncertainty more directly through identification (i.e., "This person is not a boy or a girl.") and revealed that children consistently made preferencebased, but not trait-based, predictions about the target. The present findings reveal that children do not reason about gender uncertainty in the same way that they reason about
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