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Research on distributive justice indicates that preschool-age children take issues of equity and merit into account when distributing desirable items, but that they often prefer to see desirable items allocated equally in third-party tasks. By contrast, less is known about the development of retributive justice. In a study with 4- to 10-year-old children (n = 123) and adults (n = 93), we directly compared the development of reasoning about distributive and retributive justice. We measured the amount of rewards or punishments that participants allocated to recipients who differed in the amount of good or bad things they had done. We also measured judgments about collective rewards and punishments. We found that the developmental trajectory of thinking about retributive justice parallels that of distributive justice. The 4- to 5-year-olds were the most likely to prefer equal distributions of both rewarding and aversive consequences; older children and adults preferred deservingness-based allocations. The 4- to 5-year-olds were also most likely to judge collective rewards and punishments as fair; this tendency declined with increasing age. Our results also highlight the extent to which the notion of desert influences thinking about distributive and retributive justice; desert was considered equally when participants allocated reward and punishments, but in judgments about collective discipline, participants focused more on desert in cases of punishment compared with reward. We discuss our results in relation to theories about preferences for equality versus equity, theories about how desert is differentially weighed across distributive and retributive justice, and the literature on moral development and fairness.

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]

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]