Children's understanding of the mitigating function of disclaimers

Despite earlier work indicating young children's competence in the use and understanding of retrospective "facework strategies" such as apologies, justifications, and excuses, it was hypothesized that an understanding of the disclaimer, a prospective strategy, would be relatively late appearing. An experiment is reported in which 144 British children between the ages of 5 and 11 years were presented with stories concerning an actor who had brought about certain negative consequences, having either previously issued, or not, a disclaimer. Children were asked to indicate and justify whether they felt the actor should be punished. Broadly consistent with the hypothesis guiding the present study, significant reductions in punishment recommendations following the provision of a disclaimer were found only among the 11-year-old subjects. However, from subjects' justifications for the decision not to punish, it was noted that nearly 50% of the 8-year-olds and 25% of the 5-year-olds provided evidence of understanding the mitigating function of disclaimers.