Young children from a very early age not only prefer those who help others but also those who engage in altruistic helping. This study aims to test how children assess helping when the goal of the helping behavior is immoral. We argue that younger children consider only the helping versus hindering behavior, but older children distinguish their…

Research suggests that young children possess a relatively complex understanding of adult authority that varies by social cognitive domain. However, little is known about how children react to adult authority that strays from expected guidelines. The current study exposed 4- and 5-year-old children to vignettes in which parents issue commands that…

This study investigated the effect of moral stories on children's honesty during a temptation resistance paradigm in a large sample of 3 to 6-year-olds (N = 296). Both children and their parents were also asked to anticipate if a child vignette protagonist would confess to a minor misdeed and also to predict the consequences of this potential…

Adults conceptualize God as particularly knowledgeable -- more knowledgeable than humans -- about moral transgressions. We investigated how younger (4- to 5-year-old) and older (6- to 7-year-old) children view God's moral knowledge. Cultural narratives in the United States portray God as omniscient, which could lead children growing up in the…

Moral pride has been found to be a positive component of moral life. Nevertheless, this emotion has been the object of little attention and hardly any studies focus on gender differences in this regard. Is this emotion more intense in girls than in boys? Five studies on "authentic" moral pride, with sample groups in different age ranges…

Making sense of human actions involves thinking about both "endogenous" influences (the internal mental states of agents) and "exogenous" influences (social, moral, and interpersonal constraints). Culture impacts how we weight the relative causal influence of these two influences. To examine these cultural influences in depth,…

The present study examined the effects of children's perceptions about the members of different geographical regions of Turkey on their social inclusion judgments. Children evaluated vignettes including protagonists coming from eastern and western regions of Turkey, which are namely easterners vs. westerners. Children demonstrated established…