Antisocial behavior and prosocial behavior in the condition of inequality have long been observed in daily life. Understanding the neurological mechanisms and brain regions associated with antisocial and prosocial behavior and the development of new interventions are important for reducing violence and inequality. Fortunately, neurocognitive research and brain imaging research have found a correlation between antisocial or prosocial behavior and the prefrontal cortex. Recent brain stimulation research adopting transcranial direct current stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation has shown a causal relationship (...) between brain regions and behaviors, but the findings are mixed. In the present study, we aimed to study whether stimulation of the DLPFC can change participants’ antisocial and prosocial behavior in the condition of inequality. We integrated antisocial and prosocial behavior in a unified paradigm. Based on this paradigm, we discussed costly and cost-free antisocial and prosocial behavior. In addition, we also measured participants’ disadvantageous and advantageous inequality aversion. The current study revealed an asymmetric effect of bilateral stimulation over the DLPFC on costly antisocial behavior, while such an effect of antisocial behavior without cost and prosocial behavior with and without cost were not observed. Moreover, costly antisocial behavior exhibited by men increased after receiving right anodal/left cathodal stimulation and decreased after receiving right cathodal anodal/left anodal stimulation compared with the behavior observed under sham stimulation. However, subjects’ inequality aversion was not influenced by tDCS. (shrink)

The paper presents a novel view of social norms that reflects the importance of different agent types, their specific motivations and roles. How one identifies with a role and behavioral options available to the agent is crucial for the sustainability of the social norms. The analysis of a simple case of social norm is suggested as a default model for analysis, and then the classification of subjects, enforcers, and audience is introduced. This triangular typology of agents is extended by introducing (...) a network of interlocking patterns underlying social behavior. Lastly, the paper describes two categories of transgressions based on misidentification. (shrink)

Rules are meant to apply equally to all within their jurisdiction. However, some rules are frequently broken without consequence for most. These rules are only occasionally enforced, often at the discretion of a third-party observer. We propose that these rules—whose violations are frequent, and enforcement is rare—constitute a unique subclass of explicitly codified rules, which we call ‘phantom rules’ (e.g., proscribing jaywalking). Their apparent punishability is ambiguous and particularly susceptible to third-party motives. Across six experiments, (N = 1440) we validated (...) the existence of phantom rules and found evidence for their motivated enforcement. First, people played a modified Dictator Game with a novel frequently broken and rarely enforced rule (i.e., a phantom rule). People enforced this rule more often when the “dictator” was selfish (vs. fair) even though the rule only proscribed fractional offers (not selfishness). Then we turned to third person judgments of the U.S. legal system. We found these violations are recognizable to participants as both illegal and commonplace (Experiment 2), differentiable from violations of prototypical laws (Experiments 3) and enforced in a motivated way (Experiments 4a and 4b). Phantom rule violations (but not prototypical legal violations) are seen as more justifiably punished when the rule violator has also violated a social norm (vs. rule violation alone)—unless the motivation to punish has been satiated (Experiment 5). Phantom rules are frequently broken, codified rules. Consequently, their apparent punishability is ambiguous, and their enforcement is particularly susceptible to third party motives. (shrink)

If someone unintentionally breaks the rules, do they break the rules? In the abstract, the answer is obviously “yes.” But, surprisingly, when considering specific examples of unintentional, blameless rule-breaking, approximately half of people judge that no rule was broken. This effect, known as excuse validation, has previously been observed in American adults. Outstanding questions concern what causes excuse validation, and whether it is peculiar to American moral psychology or cross-culturally robust. The present paper studies the phenomenon cross-culturally, focusing on Korean (...) and American adults, and proposes a new explanation of why people engage in excuse validation, in terms of competing forces in human norm-psychology. The principal findings are that Americans and Koreans engaged in excuse validation at similar levels, and older adults were more likely to engage in excuse validation. (shrink)

Children tend to view equal resource distributions as more fair than unequal ones, but will sometimes view even unequal distributions as fair. However, less is known about how children form judgments about inequality when different procedures are used. In the present study, we investigated children’s consideration of procedures, outcomes, and emotions when judging the fairness of unequal resource distributions. Participants were introduced to a Fair Coin and an Unfair Coin. In two between-subjects conditions, they watched a researcher flip either the (...) Fair or Unfair Coin in order to distribute resources unequally between two child recipients. Participants then rated the fairness of this event, provided verbal justifications for their ratings, and rated the emotional state of each recipient. Results revealed that participants rated the event as more fair in the Fair Coin than the Unfair Coin condition. References to the outcome in children’s justifications predicted lower fairness ratings, while references to the procedure only predicted lower ratings in the Unfair Coin condition. Greater Emotion Difference Scores predicted lower fairness ratings, and this effect increased with age. Together, these results show that children consider procedures, outcomes, and emotions when judging the fairness of inequality. Moreover, results suggest age-related increases in consideration of recipients’ emotions makes inequality seem less fair, even when fair procedures are used. Implications for the development of fairness are discussed. (shrink)

Although there is much interest in the development of prosocial behaviour in young children, and many interventions that attempt to cultivate kindness in children, there is a paucity of research exploring children’s lived experiences of kindness and including their voices. In this study, children’s understanding of kindness is approached through qualitative interviews using puppets. Interviews were conducted with 33 children aged 5-6 years in 3 schools in the United Kingdom. Through thematic analysis, 4 themes were developed: doing things for others, (...) relating with others, rules and values, and kindness affects us. These themes are examined in light of current thinking on prosocial and sociomoral development, and several key insights are highlighted, including types of prosocial behaviour, social connection, kindness-by-omission and defending, in-group bias, universal kindness versus personal safety, self-image, and a desire to improve the condition of society. These findings have implications for future research on prosocial development and for the design of kindness-based interventions, as well as providing an ecologically valid method of inquiry for use with young children. (shrink)

Empathy and altruistic behavior are more crucial abilities for pre-service teachers to possess when compared with other study fields. The relationship between empathy and altruistic behavior in Chinese pre-service teachers and their underlying mechanisms, however, has received relatively little attention in the literature. Therefore, the goal of the current study was to examine the links between study fields, self-control, emotional empathy, and altruistic preferences among undergraduates and graduates in five Chinese universities with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index-C Questionnaire, the Self-Control Scale, (...) and the Chinese Self-Report Altruism Scale tests. The results showed a significant difference between pre-service and non-pre-service teachers in empathic concern and self-control. Furthermore, empathic concern and altruistic behavior tendency of pre-service teachers were significantly higher than those of non-pre-service teachers. Moreover, mediation analyses indicated that empathic concern partially mediated the relationship between study fields and altruistic tendency. Moderated mediation analysis further revealed that self-control buffered the relation between empathic concern and altruistic behavior tendency. These results demonstrate that altruistic tendency of pre-service teachers is influenced by empathic concern and self-control. (shrink)

Recent research has provided converging evidence, using multiple tasks, of sensitivity to fairness in the second year of life. In contrast, findings in the first year have been mixed, leaving it unclear whether young infants possess an expectation of fairness. The present research examined the possibility that young infants might expect windfall resources to be divided equally between similar recipients, but might demonstrate this expectation only under very simple conditions. In three violation-of-expectation experiments, 9-month-olds (N = 120) expected an experimenter (...) to divide two cookies equally between two animated puppets (1:1), and they detected a violation when she divided them unfairly instead (2:0). The same positive result was obtained whether the experimenter gave the cookies one by one to the puppets (Experiments 1–2) or first separated them onto placemats and then gave each puppet a placemat (Experiment 3). However, a negative result was obtained when four (as opposed to two) cookies were allocated: Infants looked about equally whether they saw a fair (2:2) or an unfair (3:1) distribution (Experiment 3). A final experiment revealed that 4-month-olds (N = 40) also expected an experimenter to distribute two cookies equally between two animated puppets (Experiment 4). Together, these and various control results support two broad conclusions. First, sensitivity to fairness emerges very early in life, consistent with claims that an abstract expectation of fairness is part of the basic structure of human moral cognition. Second, this expectation can at first be observed only under simple conditions, and speculations are offered as to why this might be the case. (shrink)

Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...) have emerged, but will especially provide the reader with a first orientation in the abundant literature on human cooperation. (shrink)

Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...) have emerged, but will especially provide the reader with a first orientation in the abundant literature on human cooperation. (shrink)

The current work investigated the extent to which children (N=171 6- to 8-year-olds) and adults (N = 94) view punishment as redemptive. In Study 1, children—but not adults—reported that “mean” individuals became “nicer” after one severe form of punishment (incarceration). Moreover, adults expected “nice” individuals’ moral character to worsen following punishment; however, we did not find that children expected such a change. Study 2 extended these findings by showing that children view “mean” individuals as becoming “nicer” following both severe (incarceration) (...) and relatively minor (time-out) punishments, suggesting that the pattern of results from Study 1 generalizes across punishment types. Together, these studies indicate that chil- dren—but not adults—may view punishment as a vehicle for redemption. (shrink)

According to many scholars, prosociality, in particular altruism and empathic concern, is considered an important motivational factor both in adulthood and in the development of morality. So far, a large number of studies have addressed the development of children’s first-party prosociality and their third-party understanding of moral norms separately. In particular, there is much evidence that during the second year of life, young children develop empathic concern and sympathy for others in need in prosocial situations. Moreover, recent findings suggest that (...) 18-month-old infants already show some rudimentary forms of norm understanding in at least dyadic conventional situations. This rudimentary norm understanding is interpreted as second-personal normative expectations. Finally, 3-year-old children not only have descriptive expectations about morality, but also normative ones as suggested by their enforcement of moral norms as unaffected bystanders. However, the interrelation between prosociality and morality, in particular the prosocial motivational source of the early sense of morality remains unclear. This thesis aimed to investigate the developmental origins of morality in young children. In particular, it examines the relation between the two main aspects of uniquely human cooperation – prosociality and morality – from a developmental perspective. These two aspects are of particular importance, not only because they each play a key role in maintaining the unique human capacity for large-scale cooperation but also because of their close relation to each other. The present thesis therefore focused on three guiding questions that are essential for the ontogeny of morality and its relation to young children’s prosocial motivation to understand, adhere to, and enforce moral norms: What are the developmental origins of morality? What is the underlying prosocial motivation for children's normative appreciation of morality? What is the scope of morality? Study 1 investigated the developmental origins of morality in 18-month-old infants. A novel eye-tracking paradigm was used to examine whether infants differentiate between prototypical moral and conventional violations. In a between-subjects-design, children watched the same video clip whose audio stream differed according to condition. In the first two conditions, an instructor told an observer to destroy a picture with a particular tool chosen from two available tools. In the moral violation condition, the instructor forbade the observer to destroy the picture at all. In all three conditions, the observer then grasped tool B and destroyed the picture, which led to three different situations. Infants differentiated between two types of conventional norm situations in their anticipatory looking. Moreover, they showed a larger relative increase in pupil dilation in response to a moral violation than to a conventional violation. These findings suggest that 18-month-old infants have third-party descriptive expectations about the distinction between conventional and moral violation situations. Moreover, they provide the first evidence that empathic concern may be a decisive capacity for the distinction between these two violation situations. Study set 2 looked at the underlying prosocial motivation for the appreciation of morality as a normative notion in 3-year-old children. In three experiments, children were given a third-party fairness task and two different prosocial tasks. To investigate whether the children have a proper norm understanding of fairness by looking not only at norm adherence, but also at norm enforcement, a spontaneous protest paradigm was used. In Experiment 1, children protested and corrected unequal allocations, suggesting a normative understanding of third-party fairness. Experiment 2 assessed whether children’s normative expectations about fairness have a moral dimension. To do so, children observed a distributor who followed or violated an authority’s command to allocate resources unequally. Again, despite the authority’s dictate to act unequally, children protested more against unequal versus equal allocations. In Experiment 3, results show that children enforced fairness norms by altruistic punishment in the sense of restorative justice. While in Experiment 1 and 2 I found a positive relation of protest behavior and emotional sharing, in Experiment 3 children’s altruistic punishment was associated with their own costly sharing behavior. Finally, in Study 3, I explored the scope of morality in 5-to 6-year-old children in a typical intergroup context. Here, I investigated whether decategorization – a candidate mechanism to overcome in-group bias by emphasizing the individual person – would lead preschoolers to treat in-group and out-group members equally when sharing resources in a dictator game. I found that preschoolers shared more resources with an in-group than with an out-group recipient when social category membership was emphasized. When individuating information was emphasized, however, children shared the same with in-group and out-group individuals. Taken together, the empirical studies of this dissertation provide a novel overview of the prosocial roots of children's developing morality. In particular, the present findings suggest that the ability to feel sympathy may be critical for the development of the moral-conventional distinction and that 18-month-old infants, at minimum, have third-party descriptive expectations about that distinction. The ontogeny of fairness norms can be characterized as moral in that it is associated with 3-year-old children’s developing concern for the welfare of others in different contexts. The presentation of out-group members as individuals may be a powerful tool to reduce in-group bias and to foster equal treatment of in-group and out-group members in 5- to 6-year-old preschool children. (shrink)