 On Nichols’ account, as children mature they acquire an increasingly sophisticated cluster of rules—a normative theory—that specifies which actions are prohibited. The normative theory is acquired primarily via social  learning[18]  and includes both moral rules that proscribe harming others under a wide variety of circumstances, and conventional rules about such matters as appropriate clothing, etiquette, and classroom behavior. However, Nichols maintains, Turiel’s work has shown that both children and adults draw an important distinction in the class of behaviors that are prohibited by the normative theory they have acquired. Questions about transgressions in which a victim has been harmed and questions about harmless transgressions like wearing inappropriate clothing evoke very different responses. What explains the fact that people react differently to different kinds of transgressions? According to Nichols, the answer is provided by the affect system. Thinking about some transgressions—most notably those that cause someone to suffer—arouses strong affect in people, and questions about normative transgressions that induce this strong affective reaction evoke different responses than questions about affectively neutral transgressions. However, transgressions involving harm and suffering are not the only ones that evoke a strong affective response. And this leads Nichols to an intriguing prediction.