Abstract
The current study aimed to investigate the cultural differences in the developmental origins of children’s intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity. To this end, we compared how German and Chinese children interpret and react to antisocial and prosocial interactions between puppets. An actor puppet performed either a positive or negative act toward a prosocial or antisocial target puppet with the intention to cause harm or not; 197 three and five-year-old children participated as a third party and were asked to judge the actor puppet’s behavior and to distribute stickers. Results showed that 3-year-old Chinese children were able to take intention and context into account when making moral judgments and distributing resources, whereas German children did not show sensitivity to intention until the age of 5. These findings suggest that culture may mediate children’s intent-based moral judgment and moral behavior in the context of indirect reciprocity.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
