Information seeking and causal inference in moral judgement of six-year-old children

The purpose of this study was to investigate information seeking and causal inference in moral judgement of 6 year-old children. The subjects were 59 kindergarten pupils. The original moral judgement task used a pair of stories contrasting intent and consequence in the Piagetian manner. The experimental conditions were as follows : GI : a condition for an absence of intent information about a good intent person ; BI : a condition for an absence of intent information about a bad intent person ; GC : a condition for an absence of consequence information about a good intent person ; and BC : a condition for an absence of consequence informaotion about a bad intent person. In each condition, the subjects were asked which person was naughtier, and were also asked to make inferences about the missing information. The main results were as follows : (1) Only 8.5 percent of all subjects sought causal information in the stories ; (2) Only 32.2 percent of all subjects made causal inferences about missing information in the stories ; and (3) The subjects in the BC condition sought more causal information and made more causal inference than the subjects in any other conditions.