Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors

Abstract

Three studies (N = 867) investigated how adults’ and children’s punitive responses to moral transgressions differ depending on whether transgressors are adults or children. Adults judged the transgressions of fellow adults as substantially more wrong, and as more worthy of avoidance and punishment, than identical actions performed by children. This difference was partially mediated by the perception that adults’ actions are considered to be more wrong, more harmful, and stranger than children’s identical actions, and by greater anxiety about the negative consequences of confronting adults about their bad behavior. Despite viewing children’s actions as less wrong, adults were more likely to reprimand children than adults who engaged in identical behavior, and this difference became more pronounced when statistically controlling for the wrongness and strangeness of actions. Adults’ nurturant tendencies towards children, as well as their perceptions of children’s moral character as more changeable, also predicted relatively greater reprimand and less avoidance of child transgressors. These differences between reprimand and avoidance of child and adult transgressors was robust to the type of transgression (including harm- and purity-related norms), several individual differences, and a global pandemic. In contrast, 4- to 9-year-old children were equally likely to avoid and reprimand adult and child transgressors, suggesting that different processes are engaged when adults judge children compared to when children evaluate their own peers. Together, these findings indicate how diverse responses to moral transgressions are differentially adapted for norm violators of different ages.