Decoding the Intent-to-Outcome Developmental Shift in Moral Judgment: Unraveling the Puzzle from Infancy to Preschool Age

For decades, researchers in moral judgment development have described and tried to explain the so-called ‘outcome-to-intent shift’ that occurs by late preschool age: preschoolers predominantly base their moral judgment on the outcomes of an agent’s action and it is only at the age of 5 or later that most children start to generate intent-based moral judgment. However, recent research in the domain of early moral competencies has reported intriguing findings: in their socio-moral evaluations, infants are sensitive to agents’ intentions and are even able to disregard information about the consequences of agents’ actions. What are the processes underlying this surprising developmental pattern? We first aim to critically review recent attempts to explain this developmental pattern that focus on the factors that may impact infants’ and children’s ability to represent information about intentions. We argue that these propositions explain a part of the findings, but they underestimate the importance of outcomes processing. Thus, we analyze the factors that may influence the way children represent and react to information about outcomes, and conclude that a combination of developmental, experimental, cognitive and experiential factors is likely to play a key role in preschoolers’ over-consideration of outcomes in moral judgment (which we call ‘outcome bias’). In addition to shedding new light on the understanding of the discrepancy between infants’ and children’s moral competencies, the implications of this proposition for future developmental psychology research in the field of moral cognition are discussed.