This study investigated whether the types and amount of playful activity and thought exhibited from early childhood to adulthood are related to aspects of moral development, such as empathy, behavior, and reasoning. It explored whether the assertions of theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Erikson regarding the facilitative effect of games with…

A total of 72 elementary school students responded to six moral judgment story pairs which corresponded to all the possible combinations of intentionality (intentional/unintentional) and type of damage (personal injury/property damage). (Author/JMB)

Dutch boys, 8 and 12 years old, read brief stories about a harm-doer whose intentions were either good or bad and whose actions resulted in either minor or serious injury to a victim. The older boys' but not the younger boys, differentiated naughtiness on the basis of provocation and intentions. (Author/CS)

Investigated the influence of intentions and consequences on the moral development of kindergarten, fourth-grade, and college students. Subjects (N=216) viewed videotapes of an actor intentionally or accidentally producing a positive or negative result. While children's moral evaluations were based primarily on objective consequences, adults'…

Effects of observing differentially generous models, instructional constraint, and age on private and public charitability were assessed with 192 fourth and fifth grade girls, who engaged in a concept formation task which provided them with money. Implications for social learning theory and for moral development are discussed. (Author/CS)

Moral reasoning and cooperative skills of four groups of 56 educable mentally disabled Ss and 56 intellectually average counterparts of the same mental age were examined. Consistent with assumptions of cognitive-developmental theory, both types of Ss showed an increasing tendency to adopt higher levels of moral reasoning as a function of mental…

The problems examined in this study were (1) age differences in grasp of psychological causality during middle childhood, (2) the exploration of possible mediating abilities of a physical-logical nature accounting for such age differences and (3) relations between cognition of psychological causality and intentionality in moral judgment.…

Third- and sixth-grade children rated nine single stories which combined three levels of intentions and consequences and which varied by order in which intention and consequence information was presented. Subjects also made choices for three story pairs which varied in terms of the order of presentation of intention and consequence information.…

Damon's positive justice task, Selman's social-moral dilemmas, and a variation of Piaget's intent/consequence stories were administered to 72 elementary school students. Results showed that the level of moral reasoning increased with grade level, but inconsistencies in task performance were found at both the intratask and the intertask levels.…

A moral judgment interview was administered to 100 elementary parochial school children. The relationship of intelligence, age, and sex to the quality of response in four areas of moral judgment was assessed. (MS)

Reports an attempt to test two interpretations of immanent justice responses as causal attributions rather than as moral judgments. Finds older children use causal chains to explain contiguity between misdeed and adversity. Data were interpreted as consistent with an information-processing model of immanent justice responses. (RMH)

Kindergartners, third and sixth graders were asked to evaluate factors in filmed sequences depicting accidental or intentional damage followed by expiation, explanation or no reprimand. (MS)

A total of 96 students (16 males and 16 females, chosen randomly from each of the first, fourth, and seventh grades of a grade school and a middle school,) allocated rewards in response to stimuli representing pairs of children differing in work output and effort. Stimulus materials consisted of: (1) a booklet containing nine drawings representing…

Two studies examined children's inferences of personality for actors engaging in different domains of behavior. In both studies, first, fourth, and seventh graders were given two descriptions of actors engaging in either moral or conventional transgressions. Findings indicated that children's concepts of persons were inferred from information…