2-059 - Children's evaluations of moral intentions

Session Type: Paper Session

Integrative Statement

Agents' intentions are critical to moral evaluations. Yet whether and how children's moral evaluations account for agents' intentions remains an open question. This session brings together three novel findings related to this important question. The first paper investigates preschool- to school-age children's developing ability to incorporate intentionality information into their conceptions of fairness and claims to resources. The novel finding is that with developing social-cognitive capacities, children increasingly consider information about individuals' intentions when evaluating their claims to resources. The second paper uses new methods adapted for testing infant preferences and shows that even 10-month-old infants' sociomoral evaluations take agents' mental states into account. This paper also points to the important distinction emerging in moral development literature between accidental versus negligent transgressions. The third paper investigates an important mechanism that likely underlies children's capacity to reason about unintentional transgressions, namely, cognitive flexibility. These authors show that greater cognitive flexibility allows children to simultaneously consider discrepant intentions and outcomes, thus leading them to make more sophisticated moral judgments. Together, these papers extend our understanding of early moral evaluations and their underlying mechanisms in fascinating ways.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Marco F. H. Schmidt, LMU Munich

Individual Presentations

• Children’s evaluations of an unintentional false claim to resources: Age-related changes and intentionality attribution - Presenting Author: Leon Li, University of Maryland, College Park; Michael T Rizzo, University of Maryland; Amanda R. Burkholder, University of Maryland; Melanie Killen, University of Maryland, College Park

• Social Evaluation of True and Negligent Accidents by 10-Month-Old Infants - Presenting Author: Brandon M. Woo, University of British Columbia; Conor M. Steckler, University of British Columbia; Doan T. Le, University of British Columbia; Kiley Hamlin, University of British Columbia

• Cognitive Flexibility Predicts Children’s Evaluations of an Unintentional Moral Transgressor - Presenting Author: Amanda R. Burkholder, University of Maryland; Elisa A. Esposito, Psychology, Widener University, Chester, Pennsylvaniva; Megan Gunnar, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota