Recall and Order Effects as Factors in Children's Moral Judgments

AUSTIN, VANESSA D.; RUBLE, DIANE N.; and TRABASSO, TOM. Recall and Order Effects as Factors in Children's Moral Judgments. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 470-474. Previous findings that children's moral judgments are affected by the order in which a protagonist's intentions and consequences occur in a single story was studied in a paired-story format, more consistent with Piaget's original paradigm. In addition, recall for the critical information was controlled to assess recency effects independent of retention of the information per se. 96 5-8year-old children were each presented with 2 pairs of stories in which the valence of the intention and the intention-consequence order varied. Accurate recall prior to moral decisions was required, and 3 measures of the latter were taken: (1) choice of which protagonist was naughtier, (2) justification for choice, and (3) division of cookies among protagonists. All measures revealed clear effects of presentation order, with recent intentions being more effective. The younger children required more repetitions of the stories in order to recall them accurately. However, no age differences on the judgment measures were found, suggesting that differential recall may have been responsible for age effects in prior studies. Models for information integration and/or retrieval are discussed.