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A key aspect of children's moral and social understanding involves recognizing the value of helpful behaviors. COVID-19 has complicated this process; behaviors generally considered praiseworthy were considered problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study examined whether 6- to 12-year-olds (N = 228; residing in the United States) adapt their evaluations of helpful behavior in response to shifting norms. Specifically, we presented children with scenarios featuring helpful and unhelpful actions that involved physical interaction (e.g., hugging) or nonphysical interaction (e.g., recruiting a teacher); although all children were tested during the COVID-19 pandemic, stories portrayed individuals either before or during COVID-19. While children generally judged helpfulness positively and unhelpfulness negatively, children exhibited a selective shift in their judgments for COVID-19 scenarios: children considered helpfulness negatively and unhelpfulness positively if helping required physical interaction. These findings demonstrate that children flexibly tune their social evaluations of helping to align with evolving norms.

Third-party punishment has been regarded as an important mechanism to promote fairness. Although previous research has shown that children aged 6 and older punish unfair behaviors at a personal cost, it is unknown whether they actually intend to establish equality or whether equality is a mere byproduct of punishment. In this preregistered study, N = 60 five- to 9-year-olds witnessed that an agent made unfair resource allocations to a peer. Children could then decide not only whether to punish but also how much to punish. We found that with age, children's intervention is more likely to equalize outcomes between third parties (e.g., turning 3:1 into 1:1). In conclusion, the egalitarian motive to reduce differences in payoffs could underlie children's punishment over development.

Adaptive decisions require that decision makers factor in the subjective values of different possible outcomes, and the probability of these outcomes occurring. Subjective values depend, among other things, on how far an outcome is away in time. This can be captured by assessing an individual’s delay discounting of different options. An individual’s risk preference also affects how attractive particular choice options appear to them. In humans, probability discounting and delay discounting are often related. People who show more risky behaviors also tend to be more impulsive and less patient. Based on such findings, single-process models of delay discounting and probability discounting have been suggested. In the current study, we tested if this relationship is equally present in chimpanzees, one of human’s closest extant evolutionary relatives. We presented 23 chimpanzees with a patience task and a risky-choice task. The patience task was designed to explicitly distinguish between delay preference and self-control (i.e., the ability to wait a given delay). Still, we found no strong correlations between risk and delay preferences. As this task has not been used with humans before, we implemented a computerized version and tested it in a sample of twenty adult participants. Initial results indicate that the task is well suited to capture patience, and it makes a promising candidate to be used in behavioral delay discounting experiments in humans.

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]

Advantageous inequity aversion emerges relatively late in child development, yet the mechanisms explaining its late emergence are poorly understood. Here, we ask whether children begin to reject advantageous inequity, a costly form of fairness, once reputational concerns are in place. Specifically, we examine the role of peer monitoring in promoting fair behavior. In Study 1 (N = 212 pairs; Ages 6 to 9), we test whether children are less likely to reject advantageous allocations depending on who is aware of their behavior. Results show that children are more likely to accept advantageous allocations when their peer partner is unaware of their advantage. In Study 2 (N = 134 pairs; Ages 8 and 9), we show that this effect is driven specifically by whether the affected peer partners can see the allocation and not by whether third-party peer observers witness the decision. Together, these results shed light on the factors influencing fairness development in childhood and, more specifically, suggest that advantageous inequity aversion is influenced by a desire to appear fair to those getting the short end of the stick.

Helping and cooperation are central to human social life. Here, we report two studies investigating these social behaviors in children with autism and children with developmental delay. In the first study, both groups of children helped the experimenter attain her goals. In the second study, both groups of children cooperated with an adult, but fewer children with autism performed the tasks successfully. When the adult stopped interacting at a certain moment, children with autism produced fewer attempts to re-engage her, possibly indicating that they had not formed a shared goal/shared intentions with her. These results are discussed in terms of the prerequisite cognitive and motivational skills and propensities underlying social behavior.

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.

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. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Human adults will sometimes help without being asked to help, including in situations in which the helpee is oblivious to the problem and thus provides no communicative or behavioral cues that intervention is necessary. Some theoretical models argue that these acts of "proactive helping" are an important and possibly human-specific form of prosociality. Two experiments examined whether young children proactively help in a situation where an adult did not provide any concurrent behavioral cues that help was needed. Specifically, in Experiment 1 an experimenter either dropped an object without noticing (experimental condition) or on purpose (control). Even though children were bystanders engaged in their own task, they spontaneously intervened by helping instrumentally in the experimental condition in the absence of concurrent behavioral cues from the actor (significantly more often than in the control condition). These acts increased significantly from 21 to 31 months of age, probably reflecting children's emerging social-cognitive capacities to represent goal-directed action. Experiment 2 replicated proactive helping in 2-year-olds in a more closely matched comparison in which in both experimental and control conditions the actor did not notice the accident, and children thus had to infer whether help was needed from the actor's previous responses alone. This result shows that children are able to infer a need for intervention on concurrent situational cues, without behavioral or communicative cues by the helpee. These results indicate that proactive prosociality might be a characteristic of early human ontogeny, emerging in children as young as two years of age. (Contains 3 figures.)