To Punish or to Restore: How Children Evaluate Victims' Responses to Immorality

Abstract

Punishment is important for deterring transgressions and maintaining cooperation, while restoration is also an effective way to resolve conflicts and undo harm. Which way do children prefer when evaluating others' reactions to immorality? Across four experiments, Chinese preschoolers (aged 4–6, n = 184) evaluated victims' different reactions to possession violations (i.e., punishing the perpetrator or restoring the belongings). Children evaluated restorative reactions more positively than punitive ones. This tendency to favor restoration over punishment was influenced by the degree of punishment, with more pronounced patterns observed when punishment was harsher (Experiments 1–3). Indeed, when different degrees of punishment were directly contrasted (Experiment 4), children viewed victims who imposed milder punishment (“steal one object, remove one or two objects”) more positively than those who imposed harsh punishment (“steal one object, remove three objects”). These patterns were especially manifested in preschoolers who chose restoration when being put in the victim's situation, suggesting a consistency between evaluations and behaviors. Taken together, the current study showed that children prioritize protecting the victim over harshly punishing the perpetrator, which suggests an early take on the preferred way to uphold justice.

Children’s judgments of interventions against norm violations: COVID-19 as a naturalistic case study

“…These results contrast with earlier findings that infants and children prefer norm enforcers over non-enforcers when the only mode of intervention is punishment or verbal reproach of a transgressor ( Hamlin et al, 2011 , Vaish et al, 2016 ). Instead, the current results are largely in line with more recent findings on children’s judgment in the context of fairness or ownership violations ( Lee and Warneken, 2020 , Liu et al, 2021 ), showing that children’s preference for a helpful over punitive intervention extends to the context of health-related harm (although the prior studies involved a preference for a helpful intervention directed to a victim, not toward a transgressor). Hence, the current study highlights the need to study children’s judgments of interventions other than punishment in various moral contexts.…”

“…Further, we chose giving a new mask to a norm violator as a helpful intervention. To be specific, unlike previous research that identified compensation of a victim as a feasible alternative intervention in a fairness or ownership violation context (e.g., Lee and Warneken, 2020 , Liu et al, 2021 ), we identified that giving a new mask to a person not wearing a mask is a more relevant, helpful reaction in the COVID-19 context than compensating victims (i.e., giving a new mask to a potential victim who is already wearing it). Finally, we included doing nothing (no intervention) to examine if children think that an intervention is even needed in the context.…”

“…Overall, these studies found that adults and children prefer to compensate a victim than to punish a transgressor ( Chavez and Bicchieri, 2013 , Jordan et al, 2016 , Riedl et al, 2015 , Yang et al, 2021 , but see FeldmanHall et al, 2014 , McAuliffe and Dunham, 2021 , Stallen et al, 2018 for different results). Similarly, both adults and children evaluate those who compensated a victim more positively than those who punished a transgressor ( Dhaliwal et al, 2021 , Lee and Warneken, 2020 , Liu et al, 2021 , Raihani and Bshary, 2015 ). Specifically, from around age 5, children prefer a compensator over a punisher ( Lee & Warneken, 2020 ).…”

“…A third major goal of this study is to provide a comprehensive assessment of children’s evaluations of interventions beyond mere evaluations of niceness or rightness. Existing work rarely measured children’s perceived effectiveness of interventions to change people’s behavior, focusing instead on a unidimensional measure which assessed children’s liking or endorsement of interventions (e.g., Lee and Warneken, 2020 , Liu et al, 2021 ). Importantly, how effective an intervention is in reforming a transgressor’s behavior and in removing harm of a transgression (e.g., whether it effectively undoes the transgression) might play a key role in evaluating an intervention.…”

Children endorse deterrence motivations for third-party punishment but derive higher enjoyment from compensating victims

“…Thus, we investigate here a range of factors that could potentially modulate children's choices between punishment and compensation, the affective states following the enactment of these two types of third-party interventions, as well as the motivational basis of punishment. Given that most of the literature on children's third-party interventions has been conducted in Northern European and Northern American countries (but see Yang et al, 2021 andLiu et al, 2021), we included children from three different countries (UK, Italy and Colombia) to increase diversity in the sample. Our analysis focuses on commonalities rather than differences across countries.…”