Decoding the intent-to-outcome developmental shift in moral judgment, from infancy to preschool age: A critical review and a novel proposition

Abstract

For decades, researchers in moral judgment development have described and tried to explain the so-called ‘outcome-to-intent shift’ that occurs by late preschool age: preschoolers predominantly base their moral judgments on the actions’ outcomes and it is only at the age of 5 or later that most children start to generate intent-based judgments. However, recent research in the domain of early moral development has reported intriguing findings: in their socio-moral evaluations, infants are sensitive to agents’ intentions and disregard information about the consequences of agents’ actions. What are the processes underlying this surprising developmental pattern? We first aim to critically review recent attempts to explain it which focus on the factors that impact infants’ and children’s sensitivity to information about intentions. We thus offer a review of the vast infant and child literature on the development of intent-based moral judgment. Next, we argue that current propositions explain a part of the findings, but they underestimate the importance of outcomes processing. By analyzing the factors that may influence the way children represent and react to outcomes, we offer a new proposition: a combination of developmental, experimental, cognitive and experiential factors determines a heightened sensitivity to outcomes in preschoolers, compared to other age groups. In addition to shedding new light on the understanding of the discrepancy between infants’ and children’s moral evaluations, the implications of this proposition for future developmental psychology research in the field of moral cognition are discussed.