Issues in the Developmental Study of How Children Use Intention and Consequence Information to Make Moral Evaluations

Abstract

GRUENEICH, ROYAL. Issues in the Developmental Study of How Children Use Intention and Consequence Information to Make Moral Evaluation. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 29-43. Although Piaget's seminal work on children's use of intention and consequence information to make moral evaluations has spawned a substantial amount of subsequent research, progress in this area has been hampered by serious conceptual and methodological problems. 1 serious limitation is that research has not provided a sufficiently complex account of the structure of intention and consequence information. The paper attempts to remedy this deficiency by describing the concepts of intentions and consequences in terms of a set of features which are organized and interrelated in specific ways. The research has also suffered from the inability to separate the impact of moral as opposed to cognitive factors on children's judgments. One such problem is that stimulus stories often do not adequately represent intention and consequence information. It is suggested that use of the story-grammar analysis, which has been designed to analyze the structure of simple stories, can help alleviate problems associated with stimulus construction. Another problem concerns the existence of developmental differences in children's memory for explicit story information. Guidelines are prescribed for dealing with memory by either assessing its effect on judgments or controlling for its influence. A final problem which is discussed concerns children's comprehension or understanding of story information. Since children of different ages may form different interpretations of a story, it is essential to make an explicit assessment of comprehension and determine how this factor is related to judgments. Procedures which may accomplish this goal are discussed.