Advantage and forgiveness: The roles of advantage, knowledge state, apology, and theory of mind in children’s evaluations of rule-breaking

• Published in: Cognitive development Vol. 75; p. 101610
• Main Authors: Marlow, Christina S., Strelan, Peter, Mulvey, Kelly Lynn
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.07.2025
• Subjects: Apology; Children's moral judgments; Forgiveness; Knowledge state; Rule-breaking; Forgiveness; Knowledge state; Children's moral judgments; Rule-breaking; Apology
• ISSN: 0885-2014
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2025.101610

It is unclear how children evaluate the acceptability of and fairness of forgiveness in scenarios of advantageous (cheating) and disadvantageous rule-breaking in third party scenarios. Prior work reveals that children increasingly consider intentionality and remorse when making moral judgments. Socio-cognitive skills, such as Theory of Mind (ToM), may underlie developmental changes in attending to these factors. We hypothesized that children would find situations of disadvantageous, unaware, remorseful rule-breaking as less severe and more deserving of forgiveness than advantageous, aware, and unremorseful rule-breaking. We also hypothesized that with increased ToM, children will make more nuanced evaluations. 181 4–10-year-old children (Mage = 6 years; 9 months months, 49.2 % female, 53 % White/European American) listened to vignettes where a rule was broken either with knowledge or not, either advantageously or disadvantageously, and the violator either apologized or not, and then evaluated the transgressor’s actions. False-belief ToM was also assessed. Regressions were conducted on ratings of acceptability and fairness of cognitive and behavioral forms of forgiveness. Children found advantageous rule-breaking as less acceptable than disadvantageous. Children found remorseful rule-breaking more acceptable and fairer to forgive. Knowledge-state was moderated by ToM, where for unaware acts, those with greater ToM rated them less severely. Children mostly referenced societal concerns in their reasoning. Future research on rule-violations and forgiveness needs to continue to consider factors beyond the rule breaking itself. Overall, even young children are sensitive to the web of factors that surround rulebreaking and utilize these factors in their acceptability and fairness of forgiveness evaluations. •Young children consider multiple factors (advantage, remorse, knowledge state) when evaluating rule-violations.•Disadvantageous and apologetic rule-violations are more acceptable than advantageous or unapologetic.•Overall, children rate forgiveness as fair and not-forgiving as unfair.•Theory of Mind matters for considering acceptability of unaware rule-violations and for the fairness of some non-forgiving behaviors.