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Children consider both outcome and intent in moral judgements, punishment recommendations, and reward allocations

In early-to-middle childhood children are thought to move from judging actions based solely on outcomes to also taking actors’ intentions into account. There is little research on how particular cognitive capabilities contribute to this breakthrough, or whether it occurs in children outside Europe and North America. We addressed both issues in a study of 174 children (94 girls, 80 boys), aged between 3-4, 5-6 and 7-8 years old, from low-income backgrounds in Bogotá, Colombia. Participants were presented with 4 vignettes in which an action’s outcome and the agent’s intention were systematically varied. Children were asked how good/bad each agent was, how much punishment they deserved, and how many reward points (linked to prizes) they would receive. They also completed a standard false-belief task. Both outcome and intention affected decisions in all 3 age groups, and indeed there was a much stronger effect of intention on all three measures. There was evidence of an outcome-to-intent shift only in behavioral rewards: 3–4 and 5–6-year-old children treated accidental transgressions as equivalent to intentional transgressions or failed attempts to do harm, while 7–8-year-old children assigned more points to accidental than intentional transgressors. Performance on the false-belief task was linked more with abstract judgements than with behavioral rewards. These results add to evidence that even young children consider agents’ intentions when making moral judgements. However, outcomes also mattered for all age groups, since accidents were never judged to be as acceptable as actions with both positive outcomes and positive intentions.