Toddlers draw broad negative inferences from wrongdoers' moral violations.

ABSTRACT: By 2 y of age, children possess expectations about several different moral principles. Building on these results, we asked whether children who observed a wrongdoer violate a principle would draw negative inferences from this violation about how the wrongdoer was likely to behave in other contexts. In four experiments, 25-mo-old toddlers (n = 152) first saw a wrongdoer harm a protagonist. When toddlers judged the wrongdoer's behavior to violate the principle of ingroup support or harm avoidance, they did not find it unexpected if the wrongdoer next violated the principle of fairness by dividing resources unfairly between two other protagonists (Exps. 2 and 3), but they did find it unexpected if the wrongdoer next acted generously by giving another protagonist most of a resource to be share

SUBMITTER: Ting F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8488678 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature