Intention, Act, and Outcome in BehavioralPrediction and Moral JudgmentPhilip David Zelazo, Charles C. Helwig, and Anna LauUniversity of TorontoZELAZO, PHILIP DAVID; HELWIG, CHARLES C; and LAU, ANNA. Intention, Act, and Outcome inBehavioral Prediction and Moral Judgment. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1996,67,2478-2492. 72 childrenat 3,4, and 5 years of age and 24 undergraduates were required to use information about intentionunder a normal causal system or a noncanonical one (e.g., hitting causes pleasure) to predict anagent's behavior. Additionally, they were asked to integrate intentions, acts, and outcomes tojudge an act's acceptability and assign punishment. 3-year-olds performed poorly on behavioralprediction in the noncanonical condition. Most participants at all ages made categorical judg-ments of act acceptability based solely on outcome, although quantitative ratings reflected anage-related increase in sensitivity to intention information. When assigning punishment, many3-year-olds used a simple intention or outcome rule, whereas older participants were more likelyto use a conjunction rule (if outcome is negative and intention is negative then punish). Together,the results reveal both an early understanding of harm and changes in the complexity of therules that children use to predict behavior and integrate information.A large body of researcb on social rea-soning has demonstrated that, by the pre-school years, children differentiate moralacts involving harm and unfairness from so-cial conventions, judging the former to beindependent of external authority, punish-ment, and explicit sanctions (Nucci & Tu-riel, 1978; Smetana, 1981, 1985; Smetana &Braeges, 1990; Smetana, Kelly, & Twen-tyman, 1984). For example, in a study bySmetana and Braeges (1990), childrenjudged the permissibility, seriousness, gen-eralizability, and rule and authority contin-gency of both moral and conventional trans-gressions. In addition, these children ratedthe amount of punishment that the transgres-sors deserved. Older children (42 months)distinguished moral and conventional actson all criteria, whereas the youngest chil-dren (24 months) did not distinguish theseacts on any of the criteria. The intermediateage group (34 months) judged moral trans-gressions to be more generalizably wrong(i.e., wrong across social contexts) tban so-cial conventional transgressions, althoughthey did not distinguish these acts on anyother dimension.Although these findings suggest thatchildren have begun to formulate a distinctdomain of moral judgment by the end of thethird year of life, the basis for children'sjudgments that moral acts are wrong acrosssocial contexts remains largely unexplored.Justifications are commonly used to addressthis question in research with older partici-pants (Turiel, 1983), but heavily language-based techniques are not feasible witbyoung prescboolers. Researchers workingfrom what has come to be known as a socialdomain perspective (Smetana & Braeges,1990; Turiel, Killen, & Helwig, 1987) haveproposed that young children abstract outproperties of events to form distinctionsbetween moral, personal, and social-conventional domains of social judgment. Inthe case of the moral domain, this view leadsto certain expectations about the relationsbetween what have been called the substan-tive features of moral concepts (e.g., harm)and the formal criteria (e.g., generalizability)proposed jointly to comprise the moral do-main (Helwig, Tisak, & Turiel, 1990; Turiel,1989). One expectation is that childrenshould use the concept of harm to evaluateThe research reported herein was supported by a grant from NSERC of Canada to P. D.Zelazo and a grant from SSHRC of Canada to C. Helwig. A. Lau is now at the Department ofPsychology, UCLA. The authors would like to thank Doug Frye, Karen Li, David Moshman,Steve Reznick, Elliot Turiel, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on anearlier draft of the article. Please send correspondence to P. D. Zelazo or C. C. Helwig, Depart-ment of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G3 (e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]).[Child Development, 1996,67,2478-2492. © 1996 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.All rights reserved. 0009-3920/96/6705-0036$01.00]Zelazo, Helwig, and Lau 2479acts either before, or at the same time that,they treat moral acts as generalizable acrosscontexts. If judgments of generalizability oc-curred before children used harm to guidethe evaluation of acts, this would point toother origins of early domain distinctions.An alternative account, for example, mightpropose that the existence of an invariant as-sociation between specific acts, like hitting,and punishment or adult sanctions leads tothe judgment that these acts exclusively arewrong across social contexts, unlike otheracts. This alternative account would allowfor the finding that children distinguish cer-tain acts (labeled as moral) according to a setof formal criteria prior to learning, tbroughmodeling or some other social communica-tion mechanism, that harm is the basis ofadult sanctions regarding moral acts (see Ed-wards, 1987).Because moral acts have intrinsic conse-quences (Turiel, 1983), it is extremely diffi-cult to test these alternative explanations ofearly moral judgments. Indeed, it is impossi-ble, under normal circumstances, to dissoci-ate acts (e.g., hitting) from their outcomes(e.g., harm) in order to test the hypothesis(Turiel et al., 1987) that concepts of harmunderlie moral judgments in the preschoolyears. However, it should be possible to de-tennine the basis of young children's moraljudgments by creating hypothetical eventsin which the normal relations between actsand outcomes are altered or reversed. If cbil-dren's judgments about moral acts such ashitting stem from an appreciation of theharm that these acts cause, and are not sim-ply due to a negative association betweenexternal sanctions and the act itself, thenyoung children should judge it to be accept-able to bit under circumstances wbere hit-ting leads to a positive consequence (plea-sure). Likewise, they should judge it to beunacceptable to engage in a normally ac-ceptable act (e.g., petting an animal) whenthis act leads to harm. Exploration of youngchildren's reasoning in these situations ofnoncanonical causality may therefore pro-vide important information about the fea-tures of acts to which young children are re-sponsive.The current study used a