Barrett,H.C.
Keller,M.
Takezawa,M.
Wichary,S.

Previous research on children’s understanding of social contracts has shown that children are able to identify violations of social contracts from an early age, that they attribute negative feelings including anger to victims of contract violations, and that attributions of negative (moral) feelings to violators increase with age. This study examines two questions that have not been systematically investigated in prior work. First, do children attribute specific types of negative emotion, guilt and anger, to violators and victims of social contracts, and do these attributions change with age? Second, do children’s attributions of guilt and anger depend on the social roles of the parties in the contract, including parents and offspring, siblings, and friends? Using a bilateral social contract scenario with first and fourth graders, we found that children in both age groups were able to identify contract violations, and attributed guilt to violators and anger to victims of social contract violations. Although anger and guilt attributions increased with age, they were high across both ages, and relatively unaffected by type of role relationship. These results suggest that children understand the moral emotions associated with violations of social contracts.

Barrett, H. C., Keller, M., Takezawa, M., & Wichary, S. (2007). Relationships and emotions in children's understanding of social contract violations. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 213-234. (Full text)

Publication year	2007
Document type:	Article
Publication status:	Published
External URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/JEP.2007.1022 View
Categories:	Emotion
Keywords:	cognitive developmentevolutionary psychologyperspective takingsocial contract reasoningsocial emotions