Preschoolers' moral actions and emotions in Prisoner's Dilemma.

The moral acts of 19 dyads of 4-year-olds ina cognitively simplified version of Prisoner's Dilemma were analyzed in relationship to their friendship, emotions, and processes of conflict resolution. Degree of friendship was rated by teachers; two sociologists used a Q-sort of Group Processes to describe the dyads ' interactions; the emotions of each child were coded from videotape--indepen-dently of his or her partner's and with the sound turned off--in accordance with Ekman and Frie-sen's (1983) Emotion Facial Action Coding System. Moral acts were categorically identified as equal-ization, reparation, stalemate, default, and betrayal; these acts were also assigned scale scores on a dimension of moral sensitivity that was independently derived from separate work with a sample of 143 undergraduates. They judged the five acts in all possible paired comparisons and then rated the moral difference between each pair. These data almost perfectly fitted a model of increasing mono-tonic function according to Kruskal's (1964) criterion. The degree of friendship between the dyads and their interactive processes---group orientation, positive emotional tone, and active involve-ment--were positively related to sensitive moral action. Their emotions were related to concurrent acts, and more importantly, predicted their subsequent acts even though they seldom talked about morality. These results uggest that if social scientists ' earch for practical morality is to be successful,