Moral duty and equalization concerns motivate children’s third-party punishment.

Abstract

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.

Children endorse deterrence motivations for third-party punishment but derive higher enjoyment from compensating victims

“…'s (2008) findings about the negative effect of punishment-induced rumination on adults' affective states, we expected that children's punishment enjoyment would decrease across time. Since it has been previously demonstrated that British children's emotional experience of punishing was on average neither positive nor negative when measured at the end of the experiment (Arini et al, 2021), we predicted we would find comparable results also in the current study at the same time point. However, we did not formulate any specific prediction for the temporal pattern compensation enjoyment would follow.…”

“…We were less confident in making predictions about the effect of inequity transgressions, given the lack of relevant literature at the time of developing our experiment (contrasting findings were published later, see Lee &Warneken, 2020 and. However, it seemed plausible that children would preferentially endorse compensation in response to inequity, as there is evidence that children are motivated to intervene as third parties by the desire to even out the resource imbalances experienced by victims (Arini et al, 2021). Importantly, in our paradigm resource imbalances could be corrected only via compensation, not punishment.…”

“…It is unclear whether individuals' endorsement of punishment vs. compensation is aligned to enjoyment of punishment vs. compensation. A misalignment (i.e., preferential endorsement of punishment accompanied by higher enjoyment of compensation) would suggest that individuals see punishment as a moral duty, something that ought to be done (Arini et al, 2021).…”

“…Regarding the emotional consequences of punishment, 5-to 7-year-old US children who meted out punishment reported higher levels of sadness, and lower levels of happiness and excitement than their peers who did not punish (see Supplemental Material in Marshall et al, 2021). Moreover, 5-to 11-year-old British children were more likely to report no enjoyment when they enacted real rather than pretend punishment (Arini et al, 2021).…”

Ire and punishment: Incidental anger and costly punishment in children, adolescents, and adults

“…Thus, enacting punishment can be seen as an emotion regulation strategy to downregulate anger and increase positive emotions. Whereas for adults retaliating against a violator feels satisfying, particularly in second-party situations (de Quervain et al, 2004;Strobel et al, 2011), Arini, Wiggs, andKenward (2021) showed that 7-to 11-year-olds derived only small to medium levels of enjoyment when punishing violators in third-party situations and Marshall et al (2021, supplementary material) found that 5-to 7-year-olds reported more happiness and excitement and less sadness when they did not punish. Social norms as to how one should act on or regulate one's anger might affect whether and how children, adolescents, and adults engage in costly punishment of unfairness.…”