Preschoolers' social and moral judgments of third-party helpers and hinderers align with infants' social evaluations

- Preschoolers observed helping and hindering puppet show scenarios.
- Children preferred the helper and judged the helper to be nicer.
- Children selectively allocated punishment to the hinderer.
- Punishment allocations were justified by appeals to social considerations.
- Children interpret helping and hindering scenarios as socially and morally relevant.

Two experiments explored preschoolers' social preferences and moral judgments of prosocial and antisocial others. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 74) observed helping and hindering scenarios previously used to explore sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Whereas 3-year-olds in Experiment 1 did not reliably distinguish between the helper and hinderer when reporting social preferences or moral judgments, both 4- and 5-year-olds preferred the helper, judged the helper to be “nicer” than the hinderer, selectively allocated punishment to the hinderer, and were able to justify their punishment allocations. A simplified procedure and the addition of comprehension questions in Experiment 2 (N = 24) improved 3-year-olds' performance, suggestive that their performance in Experiment 1 was likely due to processing or memory difficulties rather than an inability to engage in explicit social and moral evaluation. These studies reveal that young children readily interpret helping and hindering scenarios as socially and morally relevant.