Moral duty and equalisation concerns motivate children’s third-party punishment

Although children enact third-party punishment, at least in response to harm and fairness violations, much remains unknown about this behaviour. We investigated the tendency to make the punishment fit the crime in terms of moral domain; developmental patterns across moral domains; the effects of audience and descriptive norm violations; and enjoyment of inflicting punishment. We tested 5- to 11-year-olds in the UK (N = 152 across two experiments, 55 girls and 97 boys, predominantly white and middle-class). Children acted as referees in a computer game featuring teams of players: as these players violated fairness or loyalty norms, children were offered the opportunity to punish them. We measured the type (fining or banning) and severity of punishment children chose and their enjoyment in doing so. Children only partially made the punishment fit the crime: they showed no systematic punishment choice preference for disloyal players, but tended to fine rather than ban players allocating resources unfairly – a result best explained by equalisation concerns. Children’s punishment severity was not affected by audience presence or perpetrators’ descriptive norm violations, but was negatively predicted by age (unless punishment could be used as an equalisation tool). Most children did not enjoy punishing, and those who believed they allocated real punishment reported no enjoyment more often than children who believed they pretended to punish. Contrary to predictions, retribution was not a plausible motive for the observed punishment behaviour. Children are likely to have punished for deterrence reasons or because they felt they ought to

Moral duty and equalization concerns motivate children’s third-party punishment

Although children enact third-party punishment, at least in response to harm and fairness violations, much remains unknown about this behavior. We investigated the tendency to make the punishment fit the crime in terms of moral domain; developmental patterns across moral domains; the effects of audience and descriptive norm violations; and enjoyment of inflicting punishment. We tested 5- to 11-year-olds in the United Kingdom (N = 152 across two experiments, 55 girls and 97 boys, predominantly White and middle-class). Children acted as referees in a computer game featuring teams of players: As these players violated fairness or loyalty norms, children were offered the opportunity to punish them. We measured the type (fining or banning) and severity of punishment children chose and their enjoyment in doing so. Children only partially made the punishment fit the crime: They showed no systematic punishment choice preference for disloyal players, but tended to fine rather than ban players allocating resources unfairly—a result best explained by equalization concerns. Children’s punishment severity was not affected by audience presence or perpetrators’ descriptive norm violations, but was negatively predicted by age (unless punishment could be used as an equalization tool). Most children did not enjoy punishing, and those who believed they allocated real punishment reported no enjoyment more often than children who believed they pretended to punish. Contrary to predictions, retribution was not a plausible motive for the observed punishment behavior. Children are likely to have punished for deterrence reasons or because they felt they ought to

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

Children’s punishment behavior may be driven by both retribution and deterrence, but the potential primacy of either motive is unknown. Moreover, children’s punishment enjoyment and compensation enjoyment have never been directly contrasted. Here, British, Colombian, and Italian 7- to 11-year-old children (N = 123) operated a Justice System in which they viewed different moral transgressions in Minecraft, a globally popular video game, either face-to-face with an experimenter or over the internet. Children could respond to transgressions by punishing transgressors and compensating victims. The purpose of the system was framed in terms of retribution, deterrence, or compensation between participants. Children’s performance, endorsement, and enjoyment of punishment and compensation were measured, along with their endorsement of retribution versus deterrence as punishment justifications, during and/or after justice administration. Children overwhelmingly endorsed deterrence over retribution as their punishment justification irrespective of age. When asked to reproduce the presented frame in their own words, children more reliably reproduced the deterrence frame rather than the retribution frame. Punishment enjoyment decreased while compensation enjoyment increased over time. Despite enjoying compensation more, children preferentially endorsed punishment over compensation, especially with increasing age and transgression severity. Reported deterrent justifications, superior reproduction of deterrence framing, lower enjoyment of punishment than of compensation, and higher endorsement of punishment over compensation together suggest that children felt that they ought to mete out punishment as a means to deter future transgressions. Face-to-face and internet-mediated responses were not distinguishable, supporting a route to social psychology research with primary school-aged children unable to physically visit labs