Children are willing to make personal sacrifices to punish wrongdoers

Taiwan Parenting
1
2 Likes
2

A fantastic book on development and psychology which covers this topic as well. If interested, highly recomend it.

1 Like
3

Interesting stuff, but this is complete nonsense:

“[4-7 year-old] children are less exposed to social ideas about how to behave in certain ways”

By that age they have been well and truly “steeped in societal values”. I’m pretty confident this study would not replicate well outside of the US, and the researchers should not be drawing such sweeping conclusions on the basis of such a small sample.

I’d be curious to see the outcome here in Elbonia, for example - my guess is that they would have little interest in punishing the wrongdoer, because they will have seen few or no instances of such punishment, and many of them will have a concept of right and wrong radically different from that accepted by a middle-class American kid.

4

“The opportunity to teach a wrongdoer a lesson motivates children to punish over and above the desire to see them suffer for their actions,” Crockett said.

I’m not sure I would draw that conclusion from them wanting the wrongdoer to be told. For one thing, just the fact of an adult talking to them about it could be seen as a more refined form of punishment.

2 Likes