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

Abstract

Most developmental studies of the role of outcomes and intentions in third-party moral evaluations sampled children from English-speaking countries and focused on harm and property transgressions. We tested instead 5- to 11-year-old children from Colombia and Spain (N = 123) employing moral scenarios involving disloyalty and unfairness. We found that the outcome-to-intent shift in judgements of transgression severity was moral domain-dependent in Colombian but not Spanish children. More specifically, by age 5 Spanish children judged failed intentional transgressions more severely than accidental transgressions regarding both disloyalty and unfairness. In comparison, Colombian children judged failed intentional transgressions more severely than accidental transgressions in the case of disloyalty but not unfairness. This suggests that it may be adaptive for children to develop sensitivity to intentionality earlier within the moral domain their own culture is more concerned about (e.g., loyalty in collectivistic cultures). Regarding punishment severity, we observed an outcome-to-intent shift in Spanish but not Colombian children. In other words, while Colombian children punished failed intentional transgressions and accidental transgressions equally for the whole age range, Spanish children began to punish failed intentional transgressions of both moral domains more severely than accidental transgressions around 8 years of age. Finally, neither Colombian nor Spanish children enjoyed engaging in punishment. Colombian children even anticipated administering punishment to feel worse than it actually felt during and after punishment allocation. These enjoyment findings suggest that retribution is unlikely to be the primary motive for children’s third-party punishment in this context.