Toddlers Have a Sense of Justice
"Children, from a very young age, have some sense of justice, in the sense that they'll treat others as they expect themselves to be treated," said study co-author Keith Jensen, a psychologist at the University of Manchester in England.
But unlike adults, little ones don't seem as keen to dole out punishment, the study found. Instead, they preferred to comfort the victim by returning lost and stolen items. "
The 3-year-olds didn't seem to want to punish; they wanted to help as much as they could," Jensen told Live Science. "If the only thing they could do was punish the thief, they would just cry."
The findings suggest that, at this young age, children have an intuitive sense of restorative justice, which focuses on repairing harm caused by crime. This differs from retributive justice, which focuses on punishing evildoers, Jensen said. Youngsters seem to be strongly motivated by empathy and the distress of others, rather than a normative sense of right and wrong, such as the notion that "stealing is always wrong," Jensen said. "
* While other studies have shown that toddlers have a sense of justice, the experimental design in those studies couldn't delineate whether the kids were focused more on the victim's pain or the perpetrator's wrongdoing, said Katherine McAuliffe, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Yale University. The new study clearly shows what the little ones care about, she noted.
"They are paying attention to what happened to the victim, and they want to make sure they are OK in the end," McAuliffe told Live Science."
http://www.livescience.com/51261-toddlers-have-restorative-justice.html
