Moral judgment and metarapresentational skills in preschool and in school children

In the past few years, a series of studies have explored the connections between theory of mind and moral judgment (Baird, Astington, 2004; Knobe, 2003). In line with these studies, our research aimed to investigate the relationship between moral judgment and meta-representational abilities in childhood, testing two groups of children, one at school age and the other one at school age with false belief and morale judgment tasks. What we found was that in the 75% of preschool children passed the false belief task while only the 11% of them passed the moral judgment task. The 42% of the school children passed the second order false belief task while only the 27% of them passed the morale judgment task. These results seems to indicate that the two abilities are independent, both at preschool and school age.