CHILDREN as young as 6 want to see wrongdoers punished, it turns out.
of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and his team carried out a series of tests involving 72 children. Each of them watched Punch and Judy shows in which one puppet shared a toy with the child, while a second, nastier puppet taunted them instead
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Then a third puppet would appear and randomly hit either of the two other puppets. After a few seconds, a curtain covered the action, but children could choose to “pay” with prized stickers to continue watching.
On average, 6-year-olds were willing to spend twice as much to see the bad puppet beaten than the generous one punished. This age seems to be a critical – at 4 or 5, children showed no appetite for revenge.
“This study tells us that children have a motivation to see deserved punishment enacted,” says Steinbeis.
In a similar experiment with 17 chimps, the animals were either handed or denied food by a person, who was then “beaten” from behind by another human. To continue watching, the chimps had to push back a heavy door. Half the chimps made the effort to see the food-denier beaten, but only 19 per cent of them wanted to see the person who’d fed them take a beating (Nature Human Behaviour, ).
This article appeared in print under the headline “That’s the way to do it! Kids pay to see justice done”
