Children protest moral and conventional violations more when they believe actions are freely chosen

Abstract

Young children spontaneously engage in normative evaluations of others’ actions and actively enforce social norms. It is unclear, however, how flexible and integrated this early norm psychology is. The current study explored this question by testing whether children in their “real-life” normative evaluation of actions consider the actor’s freedom of choice. Children witnessed different appropriate acts or mistakes (conventional or moral) by an agent under free or constrained circumstances. Across the two types of norms, participants protested less if a mistake occurred under constrained conditions than if it occurred under free conditions. Furthermore, they laid different weight on the actor’s free choice in the two conditions. While refraining from blaming the agent for inappropriate constrained acts in the moral scenario, children still criticized a social conventional mistake under constrained conditions (although less than under free conditions), indicating that free choice is a more prominent factor in moral evaluations than in conventional evaluations. Thus, two domains of social cognition, normativity and theory of mind, are functionally integrated already early in development.