Intention, interpretation, and moral responsibility: children's changing beliefs about truth and rightness

• Main Author: Sokol, Bryan W.
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9082

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.