Are young children’s preferences and evaluations of moral and conventional transgressors associated with domain distinctions in judgments?

Abstract The current study investigated associations between children’s preferences and evaluations of moral and social-conventional transgressors in a novel puppet task and their links with explicit judgments in a standard interview. Children aged 2–3.25 years ( M  = 2.53 years, SD  = 0.35) and 3.5–5 years ( M  = 4.38 years, SD  = 0.52) watched two pairs of live puppet shows depicting actors committing a moral transgression and a conventional transgression and chose which transgressor they liked more, preferred more as a friend, thought was more wrong, and should get in more trouble; they also distributed resources to the transgressors. At both ages, children allocated fewer resources to moral transgressors than to conventional transgressors, but younger children’s other responses did not exceed chance levels. In contrast, older children chose the moral transgressor as more wrong, more deserving of punishment, and less likeable. Preferences were associated with evaluations in the puppet task, particularly among older children. In contrast, all children differentiated between moral and conventional transgressions in their explicit judgments, with age differences found only in rule independence. More mature moral judgments, as assessed by latent difference scores reflecting moral–conventional distinctions, were associated with preferring to befriend the conventional transgressor and evaluating the moral transgressor as more wrong. Together, these results show age-related increases in children’s moral understanding of—and stronger associations between—preferences and evaluations with age.