Biases in children's and adults' moral judgments.

Two experiments examined biases in children's (5/6- and 7/8-year-olds) and adults' moral judgments. Participants at all ages judged that it was worse to produce harm when harm occurred (a) through action rather than inaction (omission bias), (b) when physical contact with the victim was involved (physical contact principle), and (c) when the harm was produced as a direct means to an end rather than as an unintended but foreseeable side effect of the action (intention principle). The youngest participants, however, did not incorporate benefit when making judgments about situations in which harm to one individual resulted in benefit to five individuals. Older participants showed some preference for benefit resulting from action (commission) as opposed to inaction (omission). The findings are discussed in the context of the theory that moral judgments result, in part, from the operation of an inherent, intuitive moral faculty compared with the theory that moral judgments require development of necessary cognitive abilities.

Children's understanding of counterfactual emotions: age differences, individual differences, and the effects of counterfactual-information salience.

The present study investigated developmental trends in the effects of the salience of counterfactual alternatives on judgments of others' counterfactual-thinking-based emotions. We also examined possible correlates of individual differences in the understanding of these emotions. Thirty-four adults and 102 children, 5-8 years of age, were presented scenarios in which characters would be expected to experience regret. In one version of each scenario, the regret-relevant counterfactual alternative was made more salient than was the case with the other version. Adults consistently judged that a character for whom a counterfactual course of events would have resulted in a better outcome would feel worse than a character for whom an alternative course of events would not have resulted in a more positive outcome. The majority of the children's judgments were not affected by the counterfactual alternatives. However, the judgments of the oldest children (the 8-year-olds) were significantly more adult-like in the high-salience than in the low-salience condition. Although the three predictors examined in the present study (verbal ability, working memory capacity, second-order false belief task performance) together accounted for significant variance in performance on the emotions judgment task, no single predictor alone accounted for significant unique variance in performance. The importance of different social cognitive abilities for understanding people's affective responses is discussed.