Lets be Little Judges!

For 4-7 year olds

Your child will see a series of short illustrated stories about two characters. In each story, something happens that causes one character to lose some of their cookies — sometimes because someone acted on purpose, sometimes through carelessness, and sometimes through an accident that's nobody's fault. In every story, the character who loses the cookies was also being careless themselves, not just the one who caused it. After each story, your child will answer a few simple yes/no and rating questions about what happened, including how careful each of the two characters was. Your child will then decide how they'd like to arrange the characters' cookies: giving them to the character who was harmed, or putting them in a cookie jar where no one gets them.

Previous research shows that children distinguish between harm caused on purpose and harm caused by accident, and that this distinction affects whether they think the person responsible should be punished. This study builds on that work in two ways. First, we look at a wider range of causes, not just “on purpose” versus “by accident,” but also carelessness and situations where fault is unclear, to see how finely children can make these distinctions. Second, we ask your child to judge the carefulness of both people in each story — not only the person who caused the harm, but also the person who was harmed, since sometimes that person's own carelessness may have contributed to what happened. This lets us study how children reason about comparative negligence: when both people share some responsibility for an outcome, how do children weigh that in deciding what should happen next? Rather than asking only whether someone should be punished, we ask your child to decide how to respond: by choosing whether to give the lost cookies to the character who was harmed, or to put them in a cookie jar where neither character benefits. Together, these measures help us understand how children's sense of fault — for everyone involved, not just the person who acted — connects to what they think should actually happen next.

25 minutes

You will receive a $5 Amazon gift card (for Amazon.com) for participating in this study. To be eligible for the gift card, your child must be in the age range for this study and your child needs to be visible in the study video. Please also note that you must submit a valid consent statement. Each child is eligible to participate in the study and receive a gift card only once. Gift cards will be sent within one week. Please note that we can only offer Amazon gift cards for US residents, but we still invite everyone to participate. Thanks for your understanding.