Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

Abstract

In early-to-middle childhood children are thought to move from judging actions based solely on outcomes to also taking actors’ intentions into account. There is little research on how particular cognitive capabilities contribute to this breakthrough, or whether it occurs in children outside Europe and North America. We addressed both issues in a study of 174 children (94 girls, 80 boys), aged between 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8 years old, from low-income backgrounds in Bogotá, Colombia. Participants were presented with 4 vignettes in which an action’s outcome and the agent’s intention were systematically varied. Children were asked how good/bad each agent was, how much punishment they deserved, and how many reward points (linked to prizes) they would receive. They also completed a standard false-belief task. Both outcome and intention affected decisions in all 3 age groups, and indeed there was a much stronger effect of intention on all three measures. There was evidence of an outcome-to-intent shift only in behavioral rewards: 3–4 and 5–6-year-old children treated accidental transgressions as equivalent to intentional transgressions or failed attempts to do harm, while 7–8-year-old children assigned more points to accidental than intentional transgressors. Performance on the false-belief task was linked more with abstract judgements than with behavioral rewards. These results add to evidence that even young children consider agents’ intentions when making moral judgements. However, outcomes also mattered for all age groups, since accidents were never judged to be as acceptable as actions with both positive outcomes and positive intentions.

Counterfactual choices and moral judgments in children

“…In past research on moral judgments (e.g., Nobes et al, 2016Nobes et al, , 2017, children have been asked to respond to questions about how good or bad a character is acting without any visible scale. Therefore, we designed the current scale of faces to make responses to such questions more intuitive to children (e.g., Ingram & Romero, 2019).…”

Cognitive and Affective Processes in Children’s Third-Party Punishment

“…However, the generalisability of these findings is put into question by the extent of cross-cultural variability observed in closely related lines of research. Indeed, WEIRD children have been shown to succeed in representing other people' mental states (including their intentions, beliefs and desires) at 4-5 years of age, whereas some non-WEIRD children may develop this capability later on (Avis & Harris, 1991;Wellman et al, 2001;Callaghan et al, 2005;Oberle, 2009;de Gracia et al 2016;Naito & Koyama, 2006;Mayer & Träuble, 2013, 2015Dixson et al, 2018;Moreno-Romero & Ingram, 2021). Additionally, studies in cognitive anthropology conducted on adult participants, from both WEIRD and non-WEIRD populations, have revealed remarkable cultural differences in the weight of intentions in moral decision-making (Barrett et al, 2016;Curtin et al, 2020;Hamilton et al, 1983;McNamara et al, 2019).…”

“…To our knowledge, no work so far has directly compared these two moral decision-making processes in children, as research efforts have focused on comparing the development of judgements of badness and judgements of punishment appropriateness, without considering actual punishment behavior (e.g., Cushman et al, 2013;Nobes et al, 2016;Margoni & Surian, 2017;Moreno-Romero & Ingram, 2021). Our study was thus aimed at presenting a comparison between 3PMJ and 3PP behaviour, focusing on how the two are modulated by intention and outcome information, as well as by audience cues.…”