About this srcd poster session

---

Panel information
Panel 20. Social Cognition

Abstract

---

Children’s information-seeking behavior represents an instantiation of curiosity that can help researchers interested in children’s cognition to understand what types of events engender curiosity. One potentially relevant target for information-seeking behavior is the intent underlying morally relevant behavior because children and adults often lack information about intent in everyday settings. Further, while past work has shown that individuals older than approximately seven years old show greater sensitivity to intent than do younger participants when evaluating moral transgressions (Killen et al., 2011; Payir & Heiphetz, 2022), past research has left questions about intent underlying pro-social acts largely unaddressed, although children and adults may wonder about why people perform such acts in everyday life. The current work probed the extent to which children and adults show curiosity about pro-social behaviors, as well as transgressions, occur.
Three studies investigated 4-to-6-year-olds', 7-to-9-year-olds', and adults' (data collected 2020-2022 in the northeastern United States, total n=669, ~50% female, predominantly White) desire for information about why behaviors occurred in a forced choice paradigm. In Study 1, older children and adults exhibited more curiosity about transgressions versus pro-social behaviors (ds=.52-.63). Younger children showed weaker preferences to learn about transgressions, versus pro-social behaviors, than did older participants (d=.12; Figure 1). Studies 2-3 investigated potential mechanisms underlying the age-related effect observed in Study 1. Drawing on work showing that expectation violations often elicit curiosity (Kidd, 2005) and suggesting that younger, versus older, participants may have more optimistic expectations (Boseovski, 2010), Study 2 measured participants' expectations about how targets would behave in the future but did not find that these expectations mediated the relation between participant age and curiosity. Next, we drew on the moral psychology literature to test a different possible mechanism—namely, age-related differences in the extent to which participants prioritize intent when making moral judgments. Prior work indicates that around 7 years, children begin providing more lenient judgments of accidental rather than intentional harms (Cushman et al., 2013; Killen et al., 2011). Study 3 replicated this result and showed that the more participants emphasized intent, the more curiosity they showed about why transgressions (rather than pro-social behaviors) occurred (Figure 2).
Across all studies, older children preferred to seek information about why transgressions, rather than pro-social behaviors, occurred, while younger children showed relatively high curiosity about both types of behaviors. This effect was driven by age-related differences in intent-based reasoning. This work suggests that children’s information-seeking about morally-relevant events may differ from their information-seeking about science, a domain in which violations of expectations elicit curiosity (Kidd, 2005). Bridging work on moral development and curiosity, these findings also suggest that intent may play a particularly strong role in the context of transgressions (and not other types of morally relevant behaviors, such as pro-social acts) and that a sensitivity to intent may underlie elementary schoolers' curiosity about wrongdoing. Future translational work can explore how leveraging children’s focus on certain types of information can promote their learning (both moral and scientific) in academic contexts.

Author information

Author	Role
Daniel Yonas, M.Ed., Columbia University	Presenting author
Larisa Heiphetz Solomon, Columbia University	Non-presenting author

⇦ Back to session