Intentional Understanding Of Children Aged 3-6 And The Developmental Characteristics Of Moral Judgment

Intentionality is a kind of mental ability that represents things, property and state. It’s a symbol that distinguish between mental phenomenon and physical phenomenon(Brentano,1876). In the early studies, the development of intentionality is correlated with moral cognition. Theory of mind includes of desire, belief, intention and so on. The development of intentionality is closely connected with desire, belief and intention. Malle and Knobe(1997) proposed a model of intentionality after a series of experiments. They considered that desire, belief, intention, skill and awareness are the five components of intentionality. The studies of intentionality about preschool children most focused on the former three components. And we found that their development have orders. However, there are few studies about skill-intentionality and awareness-intentionality. Therefore, on the basis of previous studies, we try to discuss the development tendency about understanding of intentionality and moral judgment based on skill and awareness components.In study l,we selected1203-6-years olds as subjects(60boys,60girls),and we used picture story method to investigate their understanding of false belief, intentionality, skill-intentionality and awareness-intentionality. The results indicated that(1) Understanding of intentionality, skill-intentionality, awareness-intentionality and false belief of3to6years old children developed with ages.(2)The development sequence of the four tasks is that understanding of intentionality is the earliest, and then understanding of skill-intentionality and false belief, understanding of awareness-intentionality is the latest.(3)Children’s understanding of intentionality and false belief are developmentally relevant when age is controlled.In experiment2, we try to further discuss that whether consequence of behaviors and conditions of intentionality will influence the understanding of intentionality and moral judgment. This research investigated228children (144boys,144girls) from3to6years old. The same picture story method was used. The results indicated that:(1) In intentionality task, children from4to5years old thought that people meant to do something bad were more intentional than who happened to do something bad. And they considered the action with good consequences more intentional than bad consequences when they meant to do that. When children were6years old, their judgments of intentionality are influenced by intentionality conditions, no matter what the consequences are.(2) In skill-intentionality task,4to5-year-old children considered action with good outcome more intentional and took no account of the effect of skills. Besides,6-year-old children regarded actor with high skills more intentional when the consequences are positive.(3) In awareness-intentionality task,6-year-old children regarded actors with awareness more intentional when the consequences are good. Children from3to5years old consider neither consequence nor awareness.(4) In intentionality and skill-intentionality task, children would give more praise to the action with good outcome and more criticism to the action with bad outcome. In awareness-intentionality, children from3to5years old gave moral judgment to the actor based on consequences, but6-year-old children gave more praise to the actor with awareness in the negative situations.(5)In all three tasks, children thought the actor who was more intentional or did something good would be happier.In summary, the results showed that:(1) Understanding of intentionality, skill-intentionality and awareness-intentionality is developed with ages from3to6years old. The developmental sequence of them is that understanding of intentionality first, then understanding of skill-intentionality and understanding of awareness-intentionality latest.(2)The younger children focused on consequences when they estimated intentionality. However, older young would pay more attention to intentionality conditions.(3) Moral judgment and moral emotion judgment of children appeared similar development trends in three tasks.