Adults have rich beliefs about child development timelines, and they intuitively react to and interpret children’s behaviors across ages, holding children responsible to moral expectations depending on the case. While children’s mental capacity and its potential can reasonably motivate moral agency attribution, a question remains whether a consistent relation exists between the empirical beliefs about children’s various capacities across ages and the responsibility attribution to their behaviors that manifest the corresponding capacities. Here we tested 240 adults (UK, US) online on their folk developmental and moral beliefs with a set of vignettes that reflect agential control in various domains (motor, inhibitory control, theory of mind, planning, moral evaluation) in several variants of scenarios. We found differences in expectations about how capacities develop. We use mixed modesl to characterize the relation between expecatancy and responsibility attribution, and propose possible influencing mechanisms.

Authors:

Junyu Li: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Susanne Hardecker: SRH University of Applied Sciences; Daniel Benjamin Moritz Haun: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Manuel Bohn: Leuphana University Lüneburg