Comparison Between Children's Own Moral Judgments and Those They Attribute to Adults

Elementary school children from a lower middle-class parochial school and an upper middle-class progressive school participated in two studies in which they judged characters in stories that varied the actor's intentions and the outcome of the act. The children's own ratings of the actor and the reasons justifying the ratings were compared with those they attributed to adults. With both samples, reasons stressing intentions were used to justify children's own judgments more than their attributed judgments, and their own ratings were less harsh than attributed ratings. Some mothers from both populations judged a subset of the stories. For both samples, children's attributed judgments were harsher than the mothers' actual judgments for stories with bad outcomes. The results are interpreted in terms of causal attributional theory, especially the actor-observer divergence in attributional biases.