| Summary: | Available research meant to bring out what children of various ages judge to be right and what
they take to be true has evolved along separate pathways. That is, with the exception of a now
defunct literature prompted by Piaget's (1932/1965) early concerns with the study of the role of
intentions and consequences in morally relevant actions, recent research into children's beliefs
about belief, and counterpart studies of their changing conceptions of moral responsibility have
been largely non-overlapping enterprises. The research reported here represents an attempt to
bridge this gap by examining the ways in which more or less mature conceptions of the knowing
process influence the particular manner in which both adults and children judge moral
culpability. Study 1 focused on the moral deliberations of a sample of 56 university students and
was meant to provide a benchmark of the ways in which adults weigh the misdeeds of a story
character who acts out of either simple ignorance or misguided interpretation. Study 2 similarly
examined the moral judgments of 54 5- to 7-year-olds who differed in their grasp of the
possibility of false belief and of the interpretive character of the knowing process. Results
showed that children who subscribe to an interpretive or constructivistic "theory of mind"
responded as did the adults of Study 1, by excusing persons for misdeeds that followed from
mistakes of simple ignorance, while assigning greater responsibility to those whose wrongdoings
arose out of having misinterpreted available evidence. This finding was in contrast to the
responses of typically younger children characterized by a non-constructivistic understanding, or
simple "copy theory", of mental life who failed to judge mistakes of ignorance and
misinterpretation differently. It is argued that children's conceptions of morality, and
particularly their judgments of moral responsibility, change as a consequence of developments in
their beliefs about simple matters of fact and more complex matters of interpretation.
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