nderstanding of the motivations and consequences of characters' actions. In a series of studies, Leifer and Roberts (1972) examined kindergarten, third-, sixth-, ninth-, and twelfth-grade children's understanding of the motivations and consequences of aggressive actions. They report that although kindergartners understood (as measured through a multiple-choice recognition test) only about one-third of the motives asked about, third graders understood about half of the motive cues and the high school seniors understood nearly all of the characters' motivations. Collins et al. (1974) further examined children's comprehension of the motive-behavior-consequence linkage. They argue that, in keeping with Piaget's research on the development of moral judgments in children, the bases of the child's judgments of television acts shift at about age nine or ten from evaluations based on the consequences of the act to more intention-based evaluations of acts. In a nonexperimental procedure they examined whether this might be the case in children's evaluations of television actions. Collins et al. (1974) showed kindergarten, second-, fifth-, and eighth-grade children a specially edited version of an aggressive television program. When the children were asked to recall the aggressive action, kindergartners mentioned only the action, while second graders mentioned both the action and consequences. Fifth graders mentioned either the motive-behavior linkage or the behavior-consequence linkage, and the majority of eighth graders provided the entire motive-behavior -consequence linkage in their recall of the program. In short, the older children knew that person A killed person B for a certain reason and with a certain consequence; these older children were able to articulate the causal relationships among the action events. There is some evidence that part of the difficulty young children have in understanding motivations for character behaviors resides i...
