Order of information presentation and children's moral judgments

It was hypothesized that age differences in use of intent information in children's moral judgments might be due to a recency effect in the judgments of younger children. A study was conducted to examine the effect of order of stimulus presentation on children's moral judgments. The information was presented to children, ages 4-5 and 8-9 years old, through stories with either normal information order, intent-consequence, or reversed order, consequence-intent. It was found that order has a significant impact on children's moral judgments. In addition, memory data were gathered which indicated that the pattern of forgetting was parallel to the pattern of information preference for the younger subjects. The findings suggested that younger subjects' relative neglect of intent in the normal order of information was based, in part, on their failure to remember the material correctly rather than on differential weighting of the 2 cues.