‘You reap what you sow’: Infants expect that negative events happen to antisocial agents

According to immanent justice reasoning, bad and good life events occur for a moral reason, since they are thought of as causally linked to prior bad and good deeds, even if the causal link is physically unlikely or impossible. Children and adults from a great variety of cultural traditions often show immanent justice reasoning, but how this type of reasoning arises in the human mind is still unclear. Here, we assessed whether infants aged 5, 9, and 14 months (N = 180) expect that negative (or positive) events will happen to an antisocial rather than to a prosocial agent. Infants were first shown distributive events in which one agent acted fairly, and another agent acted unfairly, or they were presented with scenarios involving helping and hindering agents. Then they saw that either a harmful or a positive event occurred to the prosocial and antisocial agents. In all age groups, infants looked longer when the negative event happened to the prosocial rather than to the antisocial agents. Consistent with evolutionary views on the origin of moral sense, these results reveal an early emerging bias underlying the development of explicit immanent justice intuitions.