The good, the rich, and the powerful: How young children compensate victims of moral transgressions depending on moral character, wealth, and social dominance

Theories of justice suggest that it serves two main purposes: punishment and restoration. Although punishment emerges early and has been well-documented, little is known about the contexts in which young children engage in restorative practices like compensation for victims. The current study investigated whether children’s engagement in compensation and punishment (which often involve a redistribution of resources) was sensitive to characteristics of the perpetrator and victim known to shape distributive justice decisions (decisions about how resources should be distributed), such as social dominance, resource inequality, and moral character. A total of 54 children aged 3 to 7 years completed a series of moral judgment experiments. Each experiment featured interactions between a perpetrator and a victim, ending with the perpetrator stealing the victim’s toy. In Experiment 1 (N = 44), social dominance did not affect punishment or compensation overall, but older children compensated the dominant victim (but not the subordinate victim) less than younger children. In Experiment 2 (N = 42), children compensated the poor victim more than the rich victim, but they did not punish the rich perpetrator more than the poor perpetrator. In Experiment 3 (N = 45), children compensated the victim with a good moral character more than the victim with a bad moral character, and the victim’s moral character did not influence punishment. Altogether, these findings offer new insights into how children resort to compensation for victims as a complement to, rather than an alternative to, punishment.