When should forgiveness happen? Children's judgments of victims’ and transgressors’ responses to counterfactual choices

When responding to a transgression, we often consider whether the transgressor could have made a better choice or not. This ability to reason counterfactually has been shown to play an important role in children’s own emotional experiences and prosocial behavior, as well as in their evaluations of a transgressor’s moral character and deservingness of punishment. Existing research, however, has focused predominantly on how children think about transgressors in the aftermath of interpersonal transgressions, neglecting equally important judgments about victims’ attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. Here we explore how Australian children ages 4 to 9 (N = 171) reason about counterfactual choices regarding forgiveness, which plays a critical role in resolving conflict starting in early childhood, as well as related outcomes for both victims and transgressors. Children were told stories about one transgressor who had a choice and does something mean, and one that had no choice but to do something mean. They then made a range of judgments about the victim and transgressor’s responses. We find that with age children are more likely to consider a character’s counterfactual choice, but that this depends on the judgment being made. Specifically, only by age 8 did children reason about counterfactual choices for judgments of forgiveness and reconciliation. We propose this may be driven by the complexity of considering both victims and transgressors simultaneously or children’s belief that counterfactuals are actually less relevant for some outcomes than for others.