This study was designed to discover why young children fail to respond to fables in the same way as older children and adults. The paper describes a model of fable comprehension and appreciation which posits that the moral lesson of a fable is specified by the nature of the outcome that results from the actions of the main character. Although children in late grade school have been found to prefer stories that involve "just-world" resolutions to stories that do not, those in early grade school exhibit no such preference. In a just world, good behavior is rewarded by positive outcomes and morally bad behavior is punished with negative outcomes. The hypothesis of this study was that young children would have difficulty understanding and appreciating fables because they lacked a stable belief in a just world. Each of 171 kindergarten-through-eighth-grade students and 54 college students were questioned about four stories: 1) an Aesop fable, 2) an Aesop fable with reversed outcome, 3) a narrative with good or bad human characters who received either positve or negative outcome, and 4) a similar narrative to story 3 but with animal characters. In stories 3 and 4, outcomes which conformed to just-world resolution were preferred and judged to be more fair by subjects of all ages. Marginally significant results suggest that kindergarten children have not yet integrated the just-world belief into their "story schema." Kindergarteners liked the outcomes of "reversed" fables as much as those of "true" fables, and it was not until late grade school that the outcomes of true fables were reliably liked more. (BN)