Abstract / Summary
Learning which characteristics of another person are reliable and relevant for predicting how that person is likely to behave in the future is fundamental to social cognition. This is particularly true of moral behavior given the importance of anticipating potential harm. Across three experiments (data collected between December 2020 and May 2022), we investigated how six- to eight-year-old children (total N = 94; 50 girls; predominantly Canadian) and adults (N = 48; American) weighed a character’s prior behavior and emotional expressions to infer whether that character would commit a future moral violation. Both children and adults used a character’s prior behavior and their emotional expressions to inform their predictions; however, children relied on emotional expressions to a significantly greater degree than adults. Further, children and adults attributed a negative trait (meanness) and state (anger) to characters who committed a prior moral violation. However, whereas trait attributions mediated adults’ predictions of future violations, neither trait nor state attributions mediated children’s predictions. These findings reveal developmental differences in both the cues used to predict others’ moral behavior, and in the representations underlying these predictions.