Although children enact third-party punishment, at least in response to harm and fairness violations, much remains unknown about this behavior. We investigated the tendency to make the punishment fit the crime in terms of moral domain; developmental patterns across moral domains; the effects of audience and descriptive norm violations; and enjoyment of inflicting punishment. We tested 5-to 11-year-olds in the United Kingdom (N = 152 across two experiments, 55 girls and 97 boys, predominantly White and middleclass). Children acted as referees in a computer game featuring teams of players: As these players violated fairness or loyalty norms, children were offered the opportunity to punish them. We measured the type (fining or banning) and severity of punishment children chose and their enjoyment in doing so. Children only partially made the punishment fit the crime: They showed no systematic punishment choice preference for disloyal players, but tended to fine rather than ban players allocating resources unfairly-a result best explained by equalization concerns. Children's punishment severity was not affected by audience presence or perpetrators' descriptive norm violations, but was negatively predicted by age (unless punishment could be used as an equalization tool). Most children did not enjoy punishing, and those who believed they allocated real punishment reported no enjoyment more often than children who believed they pretended to punish. Contrary to predictions, retribution was not a plausible motive for the observed punishment behavior. Children are likely to have punished for deterrence reasons or because they felt they ought to.

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It is unknown whether children enjoy punishing transgressors and whether they are motivated by retribution, as adults frequently are. Children’s approaches to compensation of victims have been little studied. British, Colombian and Italian 7- to 11-year-old children (N = 123) operated a Justice System in which they viewed different moral transgressions in Minecraft, a globally popular videogame, either face-to-face with an experimenter or over the internet. Children could respond to transgressions by punishing transgressors and compensating victims. The purpose of the system was framed in three ways (between-subject): retribution; deterrence; or compensation. We measured children’s punitive and compensatory tendencies, their enjoyment of punishment and compensation, and their endorsement of retribution vs deterrence as punishment justifications, during and/or after justice administration. Children overwhelmingly endorsed deterrence over retribution as their punishment justification, irrespective of age, country and frame. When asked to reproduce the presented frame, children more reliably reproduced the deterrence than retribution frame. Punishment enjoyment decreased while compensation enjoyment increased over time. Despite enjoying compensation more, children preferentially endorsed punishment over compensation, especially with increasing age (after justice administration) and increasing transgression severity (during justice administration). Reported deterrent justifications, superior reproduction of deterrence framing, lower enjoyment of punishment compared to compensation, and higher endorsement of punishment over compensation together suggest that children’s punishment behaviour is primarily motivated by deterrence and sense of duty. Face-to-face and internet-mediated responses were not distinguishable, suggesting a route to social psychology research with primary school-aged children in times of social distancing.

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