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Abstract
When preschoolers evaluate actions and agents, they typically neglect agents’ intentions and focus on action outcomes instead. By contrast, intentions count much more than outcomes for older children and adults. This phenomenon has traditionally been seen as evidence of a developmental change in children’s concept of what is morally good and bad. However, a growing number of studies shows that infants are able to reason about agents’ intentions and take them into account in their spontaneous socio-moral evaluations. Here we argue that this puzzling U-shaped trajectory in children’s judgments is best accounted for by a model that posits developmental continuity in moral competence and emphasizes the effect of immature executive function skills on preschoolers’ performance.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Alan Leslie, Rutgers University, USA Kristen Ann Dunfield, Concordia University, Canada Xiao Pan Ding, University of Toronto, Canada
A large body of developmental research investigated when and how children acquire the ability to attend to agents’ intentions and action outcomes in their sociomoral judgments, but the conclusions one can draw from infant studies seem at odds with the conclusions one can draw from studies on older children
Since Piaget’s (1932/1965) seminal work, a large body of studies has shown that a crucial developmental change from an outcome- to an intent-based moral evaluation occurs in the late preschool years
Summary
Reviewed by: Alan Leslie, Rutgers University, USA Kristen Ann Dunfield, Concordia University, Canada Xiao Pan Ding, University of Toronto, Canada. Since Piaget’s (1932/1965) seminal work, a large body of studies has shown that a crucial developmental change from an outcome- to an intent-based moral evaluation occurs in the late preschool years. Extrapolating the developmental trajectory found in preschoolers, one may predict that infants and toddlers would rely mostly on action outcome rather than agents’ intention, assuming that they can produce a moral judgment.
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