Influence of victims’ responses on children’s costly third-party punishment

Third-party punishment (TTP) promotes social cooperation and enforces social norms. Even children are willing to pay a cost to implement such punishment. While children punish for retributive and consequentialist concern focused on the violator, whether they consider victims’ feelings when implement TPP remains unclear. This research investigated whether six-, eight-, and ten-year-old Chinese children (N = 218) take victims’ responses into consideration when punishing moral, conventional, and personal violations. Participants were shown violations across domains with response (positive vs. negative) or without response and were asked to decide whether to pay a cost to punish the violator. According to Experiment 1, children of each age made distinctions between social domains in their TPP. Victims’ positive responses decreased TPP in the moral domain, but not in the conventional or personal domains. Experiment 2 revealed that nine-year-olds (not six-year-olds) punished less when the victim (compared to a bystander) gave a positive response. This study identified the development of children’s costly TPP across domains and the influence of victims’ responses on children’s punishment.