Children are more forgiving of accidental harms across development

Abstract

Forgiveness is a powerful feature of human social life, allowing for the restoration of positive, cooperative relationships. Despite its importance, we know relatively little about how forgiveness develops in early life and the features that shape forgiveness decisions. Here, we investigate forgiveness behavior in children between the ages of 5 and 10 (N = 257) from the United States, varying transgressor intent and remorse in a behavioral task that pits punishment against forgiveness. We find that baseline levels of forgiveness are high, suggesting children assume the best of transgressors in the absence of information about intent and remorse. We also find age-related increases in sensitivity to intent, but not remorse, such that older children are more likely to forgive accidental transgressions. As forgiveness is an important tool in the human social toolkit, exploring the ways in which this ability develops across age can help us better understand the early roots of human cooperation.

Five‐year‐old children value reasons in apologies for belief‐based accidents

“…Their unaided success might be explained by the way in which the false belief was presented. Previously, the transgressor's mistaken belief was experienced by children first‐hand (Amir et al, 2021 ) or was introduced as part of the narrative told by the experimenter (Proft & Rakoczy, 2019 ). Here, participants were uninvolved observers who inferred it from the reasons provided by the transgressor herself.…”

“…Participants aged 5‐ to 10‐years‐old were told that another child had unknowingly scribbled over several desirable coloring sheets that were meant for them, and was sorry for having done so. Younger children forgave this remorseful transgressor less often than older children, suggesting that their judgments emphasized the intended action over the unintended outcome (Amir et al, 2021 ).…”

Developing conceptions of forgiveness across the lifespan

“…Similarly, 5-year-olds prefer transgressors who display guilt through facial expressions (Drell & Jaswal, 2016) to those who do not display guilt. By midchildhood, children show sensitivity to intentionality-children are more likely to return valued resources to an actor who accidentally, versus intentionally, committed an antisocial act (Amir et al, 2021;McElroy et al, 2023). Starting at age nine, according to work published by Enright and colleagues (1989), children make sophisticated judgments about the conditions that must be in place for forgiveness to occur, often referring to punishment, revenge, or offender reparations.…”

Trustworthiness is distinct from generosity in children.

“…The trust task was always run in testing sessions with additional decision-making tasks. The trust task was always second, following a task measuring children's first-party forgiveness decisions (Amir et al, 2021). We believe this order likely had no effect on our ability to compare between the two conditions of the trust task, as it was always upstream (see Supplement for more details).…”

“…As mentioned in the main text, all participants always played the trust task after completing an initial task measuring forgiveness (Amir et al, 2021). Prior to participating in either task, the participant was told that they would be participating in a number of activities with different kids who could not be there that day.…”