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Does political partisanship extend to childhood? To what degree are children, a largely non‐political population, impacted by parents' and communities' political orientations? We examined children's behaviours and attitudes during a politically divisive event – the COVID‐19 pandemic. Children (4‐ to 12‐year‐olds; N = 313) of liberal (vs. conservative) parents reported greater preventive COVID‐19 behaviours, such as mask wearing and physical distancing, and responded more positively to these health behaviours. At the community level, children living in Democratic‐voting (vs. Republican‐voting) U.S. counties more strongly endorsed preventive COVID‐19 behaviours. Political orientation was a better predictor than education, income, religiosity, population‐density, and infection rates. Mediation and moderation analyses revealed that the parent–child political link was driven by children's perceptions of their parents' guidance, behaviours, and concern about COVID‐19, and that this link was attenuated in Democratic‐ versus Republican‐voting counties. Political orientation appears to play an unexpectedly prominent role, both at the intimate family and broader community level, in determining children's behaviours and attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Third‐party punishment is an important mechanism to enforce norm‐following. However, the underlying process that explains the development of third‐party punishment is understood poorly. Here we examine to what extent age‐effects and contemporaneous experiences of receiving unfair offers influence third‐party punishment. In two studies, a total of N = 280 5‐ to 9‐year‐olds participated in a computer‐based task in which they received either fair or unfair offers from another peer. In the subsequent test phase, children could punish unfair offers as an unaffected third‐party. We found that with age, children become increasingly systematic in their decisions to punish unfair allocations. However, there was no strong evidence that an immediate experience of (un)fairness influenced children's punishment. Together, our results suggest that children develop a sophisticated application of fairness norms with age that is not easily swayed by their immediate experience of being treated unfairly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Across all cultures, humans engage in cooperative activities that can be as simple as preparing a meal or sharing food with others and as complex as playing in an orchestra or donating to charity. Although intraspecific cooperation exists among many other animal species, only humans engage in such a wide array of cooperative interaction and participate in large-scale cooperation that extends beyond kin and even includes strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated whether children tell white lies simply out of politeness or as a means to improve another person's mood. A first experimental phase probed children's individual insight to use white lies when prosocial behaviour was called for. We compared a situation in which a person had expressed sadness about her artwork and the goal was to make her feel better (Sad condition) with a situation in which a person was indifferent about her work (Neutral condition). Children at 7 years and older were more likely to tell a white lie than the blunt truth in the Sad over the Neutral condition. Five-year-olds showed only a trend. A second phase tested whether children selectively use white lie telling after it was modelled by an adult. Results showed that after modelling, children from all age groups were significantly more likely to use white lies in the Sad condition than in the Neutral condition. Taken together, these results show that children are attentive to another person's affective states when choosing whether to tell a white lie or tell the truth. We discuss the emergence of this behaviour in relation to children's developing social cognition and the increasing sophistication of children's prosocial behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human prosociality is marked by the versatility with which we help across various contexts. New research highlights that this capacity emerges early in human ontogeny. In this article, I review evidence showing that young children's helping is both flexible and robust, based upon inferential social-cognitive capacities and prosocial motivations. Then I discuss the possible evolutionary function of helping skills as an early-emerging trait. I use evolutionary theory and anthropological evidence to support the hypothesis that children's helping affects adult subsistence in traditional societies and argue that evolution thus might have favored an early developmental onset of these behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research investigates how young children evaluate and reason about the disclosure of private information. Using story vignettes, children aged 4-5 and 7-8 years were asked to evaluate an individual who passed on information from a peer revealing that he or she had broken a rule (e.g., stolen a cookie; rule type) or lacked a skill (e.g., could not ride a bicycle; competence type). These negative valence stories were compared with positive valence stories in which the peer had followed a rule or possessed a skill. Younger children approved the sharing of positive, but not negative, information, irrespective of type (rule vs. competence). Older children disapproved the disclosure of someone's incompetence, whereas they approved the disclosure of a rule violation. Children justified their evaluations by reference to social rules in the rule-type vignettes and to an individual's feelings in the competence-type vignettes. The findings suggest that young children are concerned about the disclosure of negative information about other people, but with age they become increasingly concerned about protecting the social order even at the cost of individual privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how children negotiate social norms with peers. In Study 1, 48 pairs of 3- and 5-year-olds ( N = 96) and in Study 2, 48 pairs of 5- and 7-year-olds ( N = 96) were presented with sorting tasks with conflicting instructions (one child by color, the other by shape) or identical instructions. Three-year-olds differed from older children: They were less selective for the contexts in which they enforced norms, and they (as well as the older children to a lesser extent) used grammatical constructions objectifying the norms ('It works like this' rather than 'You must do it like this'). These results suggested that children's understanding of social norms becomes more flexible during the preschool years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One line of research on children's attributions of guilt suggests that 3-year-olds attribute negative emotion to self-serving victimizers, slightly older children attribute happiness, and with increasing age, attributions become negative again (i.e., a three-step model; Yuill et al., 1996, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 14, 457). Another line of research provides reason to expect that 3-year-olds may be predisposed to view self-serving moral transgression as leading to positive emotion; this is a linear developmental model in which emotion attributions to transgressors become increasingly negative over the course of childhood (e.g., Nunner- Winkler & Sodian, 1988, Child Dev., 59, 1323). However, key differences in methodology make it difficult to compare across these findings. The present study was designed to address this problem. We asked how 3- to 9-year-old children ( n = 111) reason about transgression scenarios that involve satisfying wicked desires (wanting to cause harm and doing so successfully) versus material desires (wanting an object and getting it successfully via harmful behaviour). Three-year-old children reasoned differently about desire and emotion across these two types of transgressions, attributing negative emotion in the case of wicked desires and positive emotion in the case of material desires. This pattern of emotion attribution by young children provides new information about how young children process information about desires and emotions in the moral domain, and it bridges a gap in the existing literature on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children begin helping others with simple instrumental problems from soon after their first birthdays. In previous observations of this phenomenon, both naturalistic and experimental, children's parents were in the room and could potentially have influenced their behavior. In the two current studies, we gave 24-month-old children the opportunity to help an unfamiliar adult obtain an out-of-reach object when the parent (or a friendly female adult) (i) was present but passive, (ii) was present and highlighted the problem for the child, (iii) was present and actively encouraged the child to help, (iv) was present and ordered the child to help, or (v) was absent from the room. The children helped at relatively high levels and equally under all these treatment conditions. There was also no differential effect of treatment condition on children's helping in a subsequent test phase in which no parent was present, and children had to disengage from a fun activity to help. Young children's helping behavior is not potentiated or facilitated by parental behavior in the immediate situation, suggesting that it is spontaneous and intrinsically motivated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated young children's commitment to a joint goal by assessing whether peers in collaborative activities continue to collaborate until all received their rewards. Forty-eight 2.5- and 3.5-year-old children worked on an apparatus dyadically. One child got access to her reward early. For the partner to benefit as well, this child had to continue to collaborate even though there was no further reward available to her. The study found that 3.5-year-olds, but not 2.5-year-olds, eagerly assisted their unlucky partner. They did this less readily in a noncollaborative control condition. A second study confirmed that 2.5-year-old children understood the task structure. These results suggest that children begin to appreciate the normative dimensions of collaborative activities during the 3rd year of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some children's social activities are structured by joint goals. In previous research, the criterion used to determine this was relatively weak: if the partner stopped interacting, did the child attempt to re-engage her? But re-engagement attempts could easily result from the child simply realizing that she needs the partner to reach her own goal in the activity (social tool explanation). In two experiments, 21- and 27-month-old children interacted with an adult in games in which they either did or did not physically need the partner to reach a concrete goal. Moreover, when the partner stopped interacting, she did so because she was either unwilling to continue (breaking off from the joint goal) or unable to continue (presumably still maintaining the joint goal). Children of both age groups encouraged the recalcitrant partner equally often whether she was or was not physically needed for goal attainment. In addition, they did so more often when the partner was unable to continue than when she was unwilling to continue. These findings suggest that young children do not just view their collaborative partners as mindless social tools, but rather as intentional, cooperative agents with whom they must coordinate intentional states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preschoolers' selective learning from adult versus peer models was investigated. Extending previous research, children from age 3 were shown to selectively learn simple rule games from adult rather than peer models. Furthermore, this selective learning was not confined to preferentially performing certain acts oneself, but more specifically had a normative dimension to it: children understood the way the adult demonstrated an act not only as the better one, but as the normatively appropriate/correct one. This was indicated in their spontaneous normative interventions (protest, critique, etc.) in response to third party acts deviating from the one demonstrated by the adult model. Various interpretations of these findings are discussed in the broader context of the development of children's social cognition and cultural learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current response discusses the insightful commentaries by Dale Hay (2009) and Karen Wynn (2009) on the proposal that human altruism has deep roots both in phylogeny and ontogeny (Warneken & Tomasello, 2009). In particular, I focus on (a) what observational and experimental methods can reveal about altruistic motivations in children, (b) Wynn's idea that early altruism might confer a selective advantage to the infants themselves, and (c) how recent findings on young children's social ontology will enable us to test the hypothesis that ontogeny proceeds from rather global to more differentiated altruistic behaviours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human infants as young as 14 to 18 months of age help others attain their goals, for example, by helping them to fetch out-of-reach objects or opening cabinets for them. They do this irrespective of any reward from adults (indeed external rewards undermine the tendency), and very likely with no concern for such things as reciprocation and reputation, which serve to maintain altruism in older children and adults. Humans' nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees, also help others instrumentally without concrete rewards. These results suggest that human infants are naturally altruistic, and as ontogeny proceeds and they must deal more independently with a wider range of social contexts, socialization and feedback from social interactions with others become important mediators of these initial altruistic tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated young children's awareness of the context-relative rule structure of simple games. Two contexts were established in the form of spatial locations. Familiar objects were used in their conventional way at location I, but acquired specific functions in a rule game at location 2. A third party then performed the conventional act at either of the two locations, constituting a mistake at location 2 (experimental condition), but appropriate at location I (control condition). Three-year-olds (but not 2-year-olds) systematically distinguished the two conditions, spontaneously intervening with normative protest against the third party act in the experimental, but not in the control condition. Young children thus understand context-specific rules even when the context marking is non-linguistic. These results are discussed in the broader context of the development of social cognition and cultural learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments investigated the proclivity of 14-month-old infants (a) to altruistically help others toward individual goals, and (b) to cooperate toward a shared goal. The infants helped another person by handing over objects the other person was unsuccessfully reaching for, but did not help reliably in situations involving more complex goals. When a programmed adult partner interrupted a joint cooperative activity at specific moments, infants sometimes tried to reengage the adult, perhaps indicating that they understood the interdependency of actions toward a shared goal. However, as compared to 18- and 24-month-olds, their skills in behaviorally coordinating their actions with a social partner remained rudimentary. Results are integrated into a model of cooperative activities as they develop over the 2nd year of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human children 18–24 months of age and 3 young chimpanzees interacted in 4 cooperative activities with a human adult partner. The human children successfully participated in cooperative problem-solving activities and social games, whereas the chimpanzees were uninterested in the social games. As an experimental manipulation, in each task the adult partner stopped participating at a specific point during the activity. All children produced at least one communicative attempt to reengage him, perhaps suggesting that they were trying to reinstate a shared goal. No chimpanzee ever made any communicative attempt to reengage the partner. These results are interpreted as evidence for a uniquely human form of cooperative activity involving shared intentionality that emerges in the second year of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this reply to Ceci, Burd, and Helm, we discuss future directions for developmental research to (1) study the motivations underlying white lies and (2) how to classify lies that reflect other-regard and self-interest simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One line of research on children's attributions of guilt suggests that 3-year-olds attribute negative emotion to self-serving victimizers, slightly older children attribute happiness, and with increasing age, attributions become negative again (i.e., a three-step model; Yuill et al., 1996, Br. J. Dev. Psychol., 14, 457). Another line of research provides reason to expect that 3-year-olds may be predisposed to view self-serving moral transgression as leading to positive emotion; this is a linear developmental model in which emotion attributions to transgressors become increasingly negative over the course of childhood (e.g., Nunner-Winkler & Sodian, 1988, Child Dev., 59, 1323). However, key differences in methodology make it difficult to compare across these findings. The present study was designed to address this problem. We asked how 3- to 9-year-old children (n = 111) reason about transgression scenarios that involve satisfying wicked desires (wanting to cause harm and doing so successfully) versus material desires (wanting an object and getting it successfully via harmful behaviour). Three-year-old children reasoned differently about desire and emotion across these two types of transgressions, attributing negative emotion in the case of wicked desires and positive emotion in the case of material desires. This pattern of emotion attribution by young children provides new information about how young children process information about desires and emotions in the moral domain, and it bridges a gap in the existing literature on this topic., Psychology

Young children begin helping others with simple instrumental problems from soon after their first birthdays. In previous observations of this phenomenon, both naturalistic and experimental, children’s parents were in the room and could potentially have influenced their behavior. In the two current studies, we gave 24-month-old children the opportunity to help an unfamiliar adult obtain an out-of-reach object when the parent (or a friendly female adult) (i) was present but passive, (ii) was present and highlighted the problem for the child, (iii) was present and actively encouraged the child to help, (iv) was present and ordered the child to help, or (v) was absent from the room. The children helped at relatively high levels and equally under all these treatment conditions. There was also no differential effect of treatment condition on children’s helping in a subsequent test phase in which no parent was present, and children had to disengage from a fun activity to help. Young children’s helping behavior is not potentiated or facilitated by parental behavior in the immediate situation, suggesting that it is spontaneous and intrinsically motivated., Psychology

Some children’s social activities are structured by joint goals. In previous research, the criterion used to determine this was relatively weak: if the partner stopped interacting, did the child attempt to re-engage her? But re-engagement attempts could easily result from the child simply realizing that she needs the partner to reach her own goal in the activity (social tool explanation). In two experiments, 21- and 27-month-old children interacted with an adult in games in which they either did or did not physically need the partner to reach a concrete goal. Moreover, when the partner stopped interacting, she did so because she was either unwilling to continue (breaking off from the joint goal) or unable to continue (presumably still maintaining the joint goal). Children of both age groups encouraged the recalcitrant partner equally often whether she was or was not physically needed for goal attainment. In addition, they did so more often when the partner was unable to continue than when she was unwilling to continue. These findings suggest that young children do not just view their collaborative partners as mindless social tools, but rather as intentional, cooperative agents with whom they must coordinate intentional states., Psychology

Human prosocial behaviors are supported by early‐emerging psychological processes that detect and fulfill the needs of others. However, little is known about the mechanisms that enable children to deliver benefits to others at costs to the self, which requires weighing other‐regarding and self‐serving preferences. We used an intertemporal choice paradigm to systematically study and compare these behaviors in 5‐year‐old children. Our results show that other‐benefiting and self‐benefiting behavior share a common decision‐making process that integrates delay and reward. Specifically, we found that children sought to minimize delay and maximize reward, and traded off delays against rewards, regardless of whether these rewards were for the children themselves or another child. However, we found that children were more willing to invest their time to benefit themselves than someone else. Together, these findings show that from childhood, other‐ and self‐serving decisions are supported by a general mechanism that flexibly integrates information about the magnitude of rewards, and the opportunity costs of pursuing them. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/r8S0DGe7f8Q We investigated the representations and computations that support decision‐making in children through use of an intertemporal choice paradigm. Our results suggest that self‐ and other‐benefitting decisions in childhood are supported by tradeoffs between variables like the magnitude of rewards and the opportunity costs of pursuing them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]