Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Sometimes we incur a high psychological cost (for example,forgo something we really like) in order to fulfill social ormoral obligations. How would the information of incurringpsychological costs influence children’s social evaluations?Prior work suggests that children do not recognize the virtueof resolving inner conflicts until age 8. In two studies, we de-confounded costs from inner conflicts and found that whenthe difficulty was not explicitly stated as having conflictingdesires (a self-interested desire and a moral desire) at once,most 8- to 9-year-olds and some 6 to 7-year-olds gave adult-like favorable evaluations of the character who overcamepsychological or physical difficulty to act morally. Moreover,neither adults nor children inferred conflicting moral andpersonal desires spontaneously. These together suggest thatchildren’s evaluation of moral virtue depends onunderstanding of cost rather than conflict: Physical cost isincorporated early in development, and psychological costlater.