Adults and children engage in subtle and fine-grained action interpretation and evaluation in moral dilemmas

The dataset comprises structured behavioral data obtained from preregistered online and developmental studies involving adults and children responding to moral dilemma scenarios. It includes trial-level response data capturing participants’ intentionality judgments and moral evaluations for actions with multiple plausible effects, coded in terms of detailed intentional structure representations (“act tree” response patterns). The dataset contains categorical judgment outcomes, moral acceptability ratings, condition labels specifying dilemma type and intentionality context, and participant identifiers across age groups.

The dataset further includes participant demographic information (age, gender), task sequencing and counterbalancing metadata, standardized question and response coding schemes, and complete metadata on experimental design, stimulus materials, and scoring procedures. Data were collected under standardized online experimental protocols and enable systematic, reproducible analyses of subtle and fine-grained action interpretation, intentionality attribution, and moral evaluation across developmental stages.