Toddlers' expectations of third‐party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression

Abstract

Rewarding someone who defends the victim of an unjust aggression and punishing someone who chose not to defend her may be very important acts of reciprocation in social life. This study investigates whether 21-month-olds have some expectations concerning such punishing and rewarding actions. Infants were shown simple

Measuring morality in infancy: A scoping methodological review

“…Young children's sense of morality can also manifest in ways such as obeying the rules placed on them by external control agents (e.g., parents, teachers, and early childhood educators) and behaving in ways that support the welfare of others within their peer groups. For example, recent studies have measured toddlers' evaluations of defending actions and of their expectations of the rewards and punishments following an act of aggression (e.g., Geraci, 2020a; Geraci, 2020b; Geraci & Surian, 2021), and have found, largely, that toddlers prefer characters who defend other characters who had themselves been victimized. The results of such studies suggest that even in infancy, babies have a sense of morality, for example, around helping and hurting actions, and highlight a likely innate component to morality, following the natural‐tendency view (Bloom, 2013; Hamlin et al, 2007).…”

Moral Foundations Theory Among Autistic and Neurotypical Children

“…This type of profile analysis has been conducted in studies with larger, more politically and culturally heterogeneous samples (e.g., Graham et al, 2009;Vecina and Chacón, 2019). Future research should also clarify whether autistic children are equally likely as neurotypical children to anticipate punishment for agents who have not defended an innocent victim in accordance with the care/harm foundation of moral foundations theory (Haidt, 2001;Geraci, 2021;Geraci and Surian, 2021).…”

“…found that infants as young as 8 months old preferred agents who acted negatively toward antisocial individuals as opposed to agents who acted positively toward antisocial individuals. Geraci and Surian (2021) found that 21-month-old toddlers anticipated punishment for individuals who did not defend an innocent victim whereas they did not anticipate punishment for individuals who did help an innocent victim. Neurotypical toddlers' expectations of punishment for non-defenders extends to anticipating corporal punishment but seems restricted to when the object being defended (or not) is agentic rather than inanimate (Geraci, 2021).…”

Neural computations in children’s third-party interventions are modulated by their parents’ moral values

“…However, intervention may often be costly, because the agent who intervenes can pay a personal cost while their actions yield no immediate personal gain 1 . Recent studies have shown that rudimentary abilities for costly intervention behaviours are present in infancy 5 and toddlerhood 6 , 7 well before children actually enact third-party intervention into real-life transgressions 8 – 10 . Although there is a growing body of literature on the development of children’s third-party intervention, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying the early ontogeny of such behaviours.…”

“…Recent developmental work found that a preference for costly intervention behaviours emerges as early as 6 months in infancy 5 , and 20-month-old toddlers are willing to reward characters who intervene in third-party transgressions 6 , 7 . These findings suggest that the foundational capacity for third-party intervention, including normative understandings, emerge early in ontogeny.…”