The good, the rich, and the powerful: How young children compensate victims of moral transgressions depending on moral character, wealth, and social dominance.

Theories of justice suggest that it serves two main purposes: punishment and restoration. Although punishment emerges early and has been well-documented, little is known about the contexts in which young children engage in restorative practices like compensation for victims. The current study investigated whether children's engagement in compensation and punishment (which often involve a redistribution of resources) was sensitive to characteristics of the perpetrator and victim known to shape distributive justice decisions (decisions about how resources should be distributed), such as social dominance, resource inequality, and moral character.

The emergence of young children's tolerance for inequality: With age, children stop showing numerically sensitive fairness.

One persistent and pernicious feature of outstanding social inequality is that even relatively extreme forms of inequality can be justified with reference to merit-based considerations. One key feature of fairness with respect to resource allocation is that it is numerically sensitive; greater (more extreme) inequalities are generally seen as less fair than less extreme ones. This work sought to document the emergence of numerically sensitive fairness in children aged 4 to 8 years.

US and Chinese preschoolers normalize household labor inequality.

Across many cultural contexts, the majority of women conduct the majority of their household labor. This gendered distribution of labor is often unequal, and thus represents one of the most frequently experienced forms of daily inequality because it occurs within one's own home. Young children are often passive observers of their family's distribution of labor, and yet little is known about the developmental onset of their perceptions of it.

Who's the winner? Children's math learning in competitive and collaborative scenarios.

Games are frequently used to promote math learning, yet the competitive and collaborative contexts introduced by games may exacerbate gender differences. In this study, 1st and 2nd grade children in the U.S.

Being nice by choice: The effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's social evaluations.

The ability to engage in counterfactual thinking (reason about what else could have happened) is critical to learning, agency, and social evaluation. However, not much is known about how individual differences in counterfactual reasoning may play a role in children's social evaluations. In the current study, we investigate how prompting children to engage in counterfactual thinking about positive moral actions impacts children's social evaluations.

A counting intervention promotes fair sharing in preschoolers.

Recent work has probed the developmental mechanisms that promote fair sharing. This work investigated 2.5- to 5.

Giving a larger amount or a larger proportion: Stimulus format impacts children's social evaluations.

Young children show remarkably sophisticated abilities to evaluate others. Yet their abilities to engage in moral evaluation undergoes protracted development. Namely, young children evaluate someone who shares more as being "nicer" than someone who shares more (e.

Conflicting perspectives mediate the relation between parents' and preschoolers' self-referent mental state talk during collaboration.

We examined the relations between the referent of parents and preschoolers' mental state talk during a collaborative puzzle-solving task (N = 146 dyads; n = 81 3-year-olds, n = 65 4-year-olds). The results showed that parents' references to their own knowledge and beliefs (self-referent cognitive talk), and references to their child's knowledge and beliefs (child-referent cognitive talk) were both related to children's (primarily self-referent) cognitive talk. We then tested whether any of the observed relations could be explained by the presence of conflicting perspectives within the collaborative interaction.

Paying Back People Who Harmed Us but Not People Who Helped Us: Direct Negative Reciprocity Precedes Direct Positive Reciprocity in Early Development.

The principle of direct reciprocity, or paying back specific individuals, is assumed to be a critical component of everyday social exchange and a key mechanism for the evolution of cooperation. Young children know the norm of reciprocity, but it is unclear whether they follow the norm for both positive and negative direct reciprocity or whether reciprocity is initially generalized. Across five experiments ( = 330), we showed that children between 4 and 8 years of age engaged in negative direct reciprocity but generalized positive reciprocity, despite recalling benefactors.

The cultural roots of free will beliefs: How Singaporean and U.S. Children judge and explain possibilities for action in interpersonal contexts.

Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both endogenous influences (the internal mental states of agents) and exogenous influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth, we asked 147 4-11-year-olds in 3 cultural groups (Singaporean Chinese, Singaporean Malay, and U.

Varieties of Young Children's Prosocial Behavior in Zambia: The Role of Cognitive Ability, Wealth, and Inequality Beliefs.

By the 3rd year of life, young children engage in a variety of prosocial behaviors, including helping others attain their goals (instrumental helping), responding to others' emotional needs (comforting), and sharing resources (costly giving). Recent work suggests that these behaviors emerge early, during the first 2 years of life (Svetlova et al., 2010; Thompson and Newton, 2012; Dunfield and Kuhlmeier, 2013).

Explaining early moral hypocrisy: Numerical cognition promotes equal sharing behavior in preschool-aged children.

Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an insufficient motivation hypothesis and an insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis. With respect to the latter, we specifically explored whether children's numerical cognition-their understanding of the cardinal principle-might underpin their abilities to share equally.

The influence of understanding and having choice on children's prosocial behavior.

Humans are remarkable moral evaluators. However, between infancy and the preschool-age, children move from merely evaluating the world in terms of moral ("good"/"bad") terms to acting upon it in meaningful (prosocial and antisocial) ways. We argue that children's developing understanding and experience of choice and agency has profound behavioral consequences for this development in prosocial behavior.

Training preschoolers' prospective abilities through conversation about the extended self.

The ability to act on behalf of one's future self is related to uniquely human abilities such as planning, delay of gratification, and goal attainment. Although prospection develops rapidly during early childhood, little is known about the mechanisms that support its development. Here we explored whether encouraging children to talk about their extended selves (self outside the present context) boosts their prospective abilities.

Numerical cognition explains age-related changes in third-party fairness.

Young children share fairly and expect others to do the same. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support fairness. We investigated whether children's numerical competencies are linked with their sharing behavior.

Developing intuitions about free will between ages four and six.

Our folk psychology includes intuitions about free will; we believe that our intentional acts are choices and that, when such actions are not constrained, we are free to act otherwise. In a series of five experiments, we ask children about their own and others' freedom of choice and about the physical and mental circumstances that place limitations on that freedom. We begin with three experiments establishing a basis for this understanding at age four.

Giving preschoolers choice increases sharing behavior.

Young children are remarkably prosocial, but the mechanisms driving their prosociality are not well understood. Here, we propose that the experience of choice is critically tied to the expression of young children's altruistic behavior. Three- and 4-year-olds were asked to allocate resources to an individual in need by making a costly choice (allocating a resource they could have kept for themselves), a noncostly choice (allocating a resource that would otherwise be thrown away), or no choice (following instructions to allocate the resource).

A comparison of American and Nepalese children's concepts of freedom of choice and social constraint.

Recent work has shown that preschool-aged children and adults understand freedom of choice regardless of culture, but that adults across cultures differ in perceiving social obligations as constraints on action. To investigate the development of these cultural differences and universalities, we interviewed school-aged children (4-11) in Nepal and the United States regarding beliefs about people's freedom of choice and constraint to follow preferences, perform impossible acts, and break social obligations. Children across cultures and ages universally endorsed the choice to follow preferences but not to perform impossible acts.