ArticleJournal of experimental child psychology2025
Heroes, villains, and everything in between: Children's assessment of morally ambiguous characters.
Article in Journal of experimental child psychology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Eleven-Month-Old Infants Preferentially Look at Helpers But Do Not Reliably Evaluate Inconsistent Actors.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Most research on the development of moral judgments has focused on children's assessment of all-good or all-bad characters with little attention to the gray areas of morality. Yet real people's behavior is often morally ambiguous, involving sometimes moral and sometimes immoral actions. In this study, we examined how 4-, 6-, and 8-year-old U.S. children (N = 72; 51% female) evaluate and respond to morally ambiguous characters. Children heard stories that each contained a purely moral character, a purely immoral character, and a morally ambiguous character. The 6- and 8-year-olds were more likely than the 4-year-olds to distinguish the ambiguous character from the moral and immoral characters. These age-related changes elucidate the development of children's assessments of the "gray areas" of morality.
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