title: You get what you give: children's karmic bargaining.
abstract: Do children believe in karma - the notion that life events occur to punish or reward our moral behavior? In three experiments, we investigate 4-6-year-old children's willingness to endorse and engage in the practice of performing good acts in order to secure an unrelated future desired outcome, so-called 'karmic bargaining'. Most children agreed that performing a morally good social behavior, but not a morally negative or morally neutral non-social behavior, would increase the chances that future desired outcomes would occur, in both first-party and third-party contexts. About half of children also engaged in karmic bargaining behavior themselves. We conclude that a belief in karma may therefore reflect a broad, early-emerging teleological bias to interpret life events in terms of agency, purpose, and design.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Yale University, USA.
authors.forename: Konika
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Banerjee
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Yale University, USA.
authors.forename: Paul
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bloom
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003469:Culture; D005260:Female; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009014:Morals; D012201:Reward; D012919:Social Behavior