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The unification of two major approaches to moral judgment is the purpose of the present approach. Kohlberg's well-known stage theory assumes a sequence of discrete stages that underlie all moral judgment. Stage theory recognizes the problem of integrating considerations but gives no way to solve such integration, even with information from any one stage. And, of course, the stage concept denies any significant integration from different stages. Thus, research on moral judgment needs to study the integration problem which can be tested within Anderson's theory of information integration. The main purpose of the present study was to extend this unificationist approach to the issue of sexual morality. A novel task presents information from two very different stages. The results showed that in contrast to discreteness the stage informers were positively correlated in punishment judgments of both genders about consensual sex of juveniles. Furthermore, the subjects integrated considerations from those very different stages also in contrast to the hypothesis that only a single stage was operative at any time.
Children's information processing of risky choice alternatives was investigated in two studies without using verbal reports. In Study 1, the ability to integrate the probabilities and the payoffs of simple bets was examined using the rating scale methodology. Children's choices among three of those simple bets were recorded also. By cross-classifying the children's choice and rating behavior it was shown that a three-stage developmental hypothesis of decision making is not sufficient. A four-stage hypothesis is proposed. In Study 2, the influence of enlarging the presented number of alternatives from two to three and the influence of the similarity of the alternatives on children's choice probabilities was examined with those bets. Children's choice behavior was probabilistic and was influenced only by enlarging the presented number of alternatives. These results suggest that a Bayesian approach, based on two probabilistic choice models, should not be applied in order to analyze children's choice behavior. The functional measurement approach is, as was demonstrated in Study 1, a powerful implement to further the understanding of the development of decision making.
Children's judgements of deserved punishment were studied as function of three moral variables. Subjects judged how much a child in a story should be punished for ruining another's stamps, given information about (a) how many stamps were damaged, (b) the culpa, or intent, of the harmful act, and (c) recompense, or the proportion of stamps paid back by the offender. In three experiments, recompense had substantially greater effects than the damage for which recompense was made. This pre-potency of recompense was greater at younger ages across a range from 4 years to college age. Damage and culpa were integrated by an additive rule in agreement with previous work. In contrast, the recompense-damage and recompense-culpa integration rules were both non-additive.
Recompense denotes a more or less complete undoing of a harm which may combine the tWO aspects: compensation for the victim and the apology of the harmdoer. The present empirical research on recompense started with an analysis of the judgmental structures of recompense in legal thought and law, as such analysis has been neglected in prior research. The obtained results on recompense as stimulus and response reinforce the general idea of the present approach of using the framework of law and legal history in the empirical research of cognitive science. Since the traditionahelationship of jurisprudence and psychology is reversed by that research strategy, law and psychology appear to interact mutually, and a more comprehensive concept of legal psychology is implemented.
This paper seeks to unify two major theories of moral judgment: Kohlberg's stage theory and Anderson's moral information integration theory. Subjects were told about thoughts of actors in Kohlberg's classic altruistic Heinz dilemma and in a new egoistical dilemma. These actors's thoughts represented Kohlberg's stages I (Personal Risk) and IV (Societal Risk) and had three levels, High, Medium, and Low. They were presented singly and in a 3 x 3 integration design. Subjects judged how many months of prison the actor deserved. The data supported the averaging model of moral integration theory, whereas Kohlberg's theory has no way to handle the integration problem. Following this, subjects ranked statements related to Kohlberg's first four stages in a procedure similar to that of Rest (1975). Higher score went with larger effect of Societal Risk as predicted by Kohlberg's theory. But contrary to Kohlberg's theory, no age trends were found. Also strongly contrary to Kohlberg's theory, effects of Personal Risk (Stage I) and Societal Risk (Stage IV) correlated positively.