Judging the recipients of social actions

Abstract

There is substantial research on children's evaluations of transgressors, but less is known about the extent to which children view actions toward recipients as indicative of a recipient's personality or deserved outcomes. We examined the extent to which 3‐ to 5 year olds, relative to an adult comparison group, judged the recipients of negative behavior as bad people who deserve punishment and recipients of positive behavior as good people who deserve praise. Participants evaluated the recipients of positive and negative acts in both a social conventional domain and a moral domain. Overall, children demonstrated an asymmetrical judgment pattern: they perceived recipients of positive behavior as good people who deserve praise and recipients of negative behavior as not bad nor deserving punishment. Adults made more conservative dispositional judgments than children. These findings suggest an asymmetry in assigning credit or blame to the recipients of others’ actions in a manner consistent with an overall positivity bias in person perception. Implications for children's reasoning about disposition and the potential intersection with moral development are discussed.