Moral Judgment and Text Processing.

A study examined how people's level of moral judgment affects their memory for narratives containing moral information. Subjects, 69 eighth-grade students from a private school, 53 eighth-grade students from a public school, and 49 undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses at the University of Minnesota, read four narratives containing embedded moral arguments. The Defining Issues Test (DIT) scores were used as an indicator of moral judgment development and were correlated with moral judgment recall. Results indicated that: (1) higher DIT scores (indicative of structures of moral reasoning) were significantly related to higher principled argument recall (indicative of moral comprehension); and (2) higher DIT scores were significantly related to better overall memory (general reading comprehension). Findings suggest that there is an influence of structures on recall. (Four graphs of data are included.) Contains 30 references. (RS)