Children’s and Adults’ Attribution of Moral Judgments to Human and Supernatural Agents

ABSTRACT

Adults commonly conceptualize intentional harms as worse than accidental harms. We probed the developmental trajectory of this pattern and asked whether U.S. children (4 – to 7-year-olds) and adults expected other agents – including another person and God – to share their views. In contrast with some prior work, even the youngest children in the present study considered intent when making moral judgments. Although children did not distinguish among the agents when indicating how severely they would punish intentional and accidental transgressors, adults reported that God would punish less severely than would they themselves or another person. Furthermore, children and adults differed in their evaluation of how the agents would react to the transgressors: Adults and older children were more likely than younger children to attribute spiritual and religious reactions to God. These findings suggest that even young children’s moral judgments are sensitive to information about intent but that the propensity to distinguish others’ focus on intent from one’s own emerges more gradually across age.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data Availability Statement

The data described in this article are openly available at https://doi.org/10.7916/36y7-t132.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.7916/36y7-t132.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Notes

¹ Similar patterns of results as those reported below emerged when re-running the analyses including these 16 participants.

² Preliminary analyses comparing the trouble ratings of children tested online versus in person did not reveal any significant differences (ps≥.44). In other words, it did not appear that children tested in person provided significantly different responses to our main variable of interest than did children tested online.

³ Preliminary analyses examined the potential role of participant religious background in two ways: by comparing Christian participants with all other participants (because participants who belong to the majority religious group in their culture may respond differently from minority group members) and by comparing participants who identified with any religious group with those who did not (because religiously affiliated participants may respond differently from those who do not affiliate with a religion). Across both types of analyses, religious background did not reliably influence participants’ responses. For this reason, and because these analyses were exploratory (not pre-registered as part of the main study design), the analyses reported in the main text collapse across this variable.

⁴ Preliminary analyses did not reveal reliable differences between these contexts. Therefore, subsequent analyses collapsed across them.

⁵ Our preregistration stated that we would ask the participants to “justify their response” for the severity of harm question. However, after submitting the pre-registration, we removed this question from our protocol as asking it for each agent made the procedure too lengthy, especially for children.

⁶ We did not pre-register this question but included it for exploratory purposes after submitting the pre-registration. We reasoned that this question would yield more novel information than the question asking participants to justify their response for the severity of harm item while also being easier for children to answer, as children sometimes experience difficulty explaining their own judgments.

⁷ The analyses reported here were pre-registered prior to data collection. Based on the suggestion of an anonymous reviewer, we also explored these ratings using several additional tests that we present in the Supplementary Materials. First, we re-analyzed these ratings using mixed-effects ordinal logistic regression models. These analyses replicated the results reported in the main text and revealed an additional finding indicating that the difference between the ratings of accidental and intentional harm was larger for older as compared to younger children. Because this analysis was not pre-registered, and because conducting multiple analyses on the same data can increase the risk of Type I error, caution is warranted when interpreting this result. Second, we re-analyzed data from child participants using tests that treated age as a continuous variable. These results for punishment ratings and for expectations regarding agents’ responses to transgressions can be found in the Supplementary Materials. Because these tests were not pre-registered, could not include adults, and in many cases failed to converge, we urge caution when interpreting these exploratory analyses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [61080,61808]; Russell Sage Foundation [Visiting Scholar Award (No Grant Number)].