Rule violations are likely to serve as key contexts for learning to reason about public identity. In an initial study with 91 children aged 4-9 years, social emotions and self-presentational concerns were more likely to be cited when children were responding to hypothetical vignettes involving social-conventional rather than moral violations. In 2…

This study examined children's understanding of the distinctive "self-presentational" impacts of moral and social-conventional rule violations. A sample of 80 children aged 7-8 and 9-10 years generated examples of interpersonal events that would upset others and events that would elicit social attention to the self. As expected, both age groups…