Abstract
One means by which humans maintain social cooperation is through intervention in third-party transgressions, a behaviour observable from the early years of development. While it has been argued that pre-school age children’s intervention behaviour is driven by normative understandings, there is scepticism regarding this claim. There is also little consensus regarding the underlying mechanisms and motives that initially drive intervention behaviours in pre-school children. To elucidate the neural computations of moral norm violation associated with young children’s intervention into third-party transgression, forty-seven preschoolers (average age 53.92 months) participated in a study comprising of electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements, a live interaction experiment, and a parent survey about moral values. This study provides data indicating that early implicit evaluations, rather than late deliberative processes, are implicated in a child’s spontaneous intervention into third-party harm. Moreover, our findings suggest that parents’ values about justice influence their children’s early neural responses to third-party harm and their overt costly intervention behaviour.
Highlights
Third-party intervention into perceived moral transgression is a key proximate mechanism enabling humans to manage conflict and maintain high levels of social cooperation[1,2]
Recent studies have shown that rudimentary abilities for costly intervention behaviours are present in infancy[5] and toddlerhood[6,7] well before children enact third-party intervention into real-life transgressions[8,9,10]
Recent developmental work found that a preference for costly intervention behaviours emerges as early as 6 months in infancy[5], and 20-month-old toddlers are willing to reward characters who intervene in third-party transgressions[6,7]. These findings suggest that the foundational capacity for third-party intervention, including normative understandings, emerge early in ontogeny
Summary
Third-party intervention into perceived moral transgression is a key proximate mechanism enabling humans to manage conflict and maintain high levels of social cooperation[1,2]. Recent studies have shown that rudimentary abilities for costly intervention behaviours are present in infancy[5] and toddlerhood[6,7] well before children enact third-party intervention into real-life transgressions[8,9,10]. There is a growing body of literature on the development of children’s third-party intervention, little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying the early ontogeny of such behaviours. To our knowledge, there is no empirical work that has directly examined how child’s moral behaviours and their underlying neural processes are modulated by their parents’ values about justice. This study investigated the electrophysiological processing underlying children’s costly interventions and their time course, and how parents’ dispositions modulate the ontogeny of moral intervention behaviours
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