Alan Leslie, Joshua Knobe & Adam Cohen

Forthcoming in Psychological Science

Summary: Previous studies have shown that people's moral judgments affect their intuitions as to whether or not a behavior was performed intentionally. The present study shows that this effect arises even among four-year-old children.

Subjects were three-, four- and five-year-old children. All subjects were given a story about a boy who brings home a frog. Children in one condition were told that the boy knew he would thereby be making his friend Jeanine upset but that he did not care at all about that. Children in the other condition were told that he knew he would thereby be making Jeanine happy but that he didn't care at all about that. By four years of age, children showed the same asymmetry found among adults. They said that the boy made Jeanine upset 'on purpose' but that he did not make Jeanine happy 'on purpose.'

The fact that the effect arises so early in development provides at least some tentative initial support for the view that it has an innate basis.

(To request a copy of this paper, write to me at 'knobe at email dot unc dot edu.')

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