Children often say that possible events are impossible, and only gradually come to see these events as possible. For instance, they often deny that people could do unusual things, like own a pet peacock, or immoral things, like stealing or lying. These possibility denials are surprising. For instance, children have first-hand experience with the…

Many previous studies indicate that children are highly sensitive to the immoral behavior of others, preferring prosocial over antisocial characters. Accordingly, children avoid transgressors from a very early age. A special kind of transgressor is the moral hypocrite, who not only acts immorally but also acts in contrast to what they preach.…

Reciprocity is a cornerstone of human cooperation, motivating individuals to assist each other at a personal cost, resulting in mutual long-term benefits. However, reciprocity can conflict with honesty norms, such as when returning favors to previous benefactors requires individuals to act dishonestly. The resulting moral dilemmas are difficult to…

Inequalities in access to important resources and opportunities between social groups persist throughout societies worldwide. Social psychological research has shown that adults often use meritocratic beliefs to justify the existence of such inequalities. Yet, the developmental origins of meritocratic beliefs have yet to be fully explored. This…

Moral decisions often involve dilemmas: cases of conflict between competing obligations. In two studies (N = 204), we ask whether children appreciate that reasoning through dilemmas involves acknowledging that there is no single, simple solution. In Study 1, 5- to 8-year-old US children were randomly assigned to a Moral Dilemma condition, in which…

Middle childhood seems to be crucial for the emergence of a moral identity, that is, an evaluative stance of how important it is for someone's sense of self to be moral. This study investigates the effects of moral identity on the neural processing of moral content in 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with scenes portraying…

The current study examined the influence of observing another's lie- or truth-telling -- and its consequences -- on children's own honesty about a transgression. Children (N = 224, 5-8 years of age) observed an experimenter (E) tell the truth or lie about a minor transgression in one of five conditions: (a) Truth-Positive Outcome -- E told the…

nChildren's moral judgments of resource distributions as having "fair" or "unfair" origins play an important role in early social cognition. What factors shape these judgments? The present study advances research on this question in two primary ways: First, while prior work has typically assigned children to an advantaged or…

Recent work has documented that despite preschool-aged children's understanding of social norms surrounding sharing, they fail to share their resources equally in many contexts. Here we explored two hypotheses for this failure: an "insufficient motivation hypothesis" and an "insufficient cognitive resources hypothesis." With…

Morality is an evolved aspect of human nature, yet is heavily influenced by cultural environment. This developmental study adopted an integrative approach by combining measures of socioeconomic status (SES), executive function, affective sharing, empathic concern, theory of mind, and moral judgment in predicting sharing behavior in children (N =…

The present study examined whether having a positive reputation to maintain makes young children less likely to cheat. Cheating was assessed through a temptation resistance paradigm in which participants were instructed not to cheat in a guessing game. Across three studies (total N = 361), preschool-aged participants were randomly assigned to…

In three experiments involving 207 preschoolers and 28 adults, we investigated the extent to which young children base moral judgments of actions aimed to protect others on utilitarian principles. When asked to judge the rightness of intervening to hurt one person in order to save five others, the large majority of children aged 3 to 5 years…

Three experiments investigated whether children in grades K, 2, and 4 (n = 144) view emotional comprehension as important in solving moral dilemmas. The experiments asked whether a human or an artificially intelligent machine would be best at solving different types of problems, ranging from moral and emotional to nonmoral and pragmatic. In…