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Class Notes on Children understanding right and wrong, Developmental Psychology
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Introduction to Developmental PsychologyChildren’s Understanding of Right and Wrong
Morality and Moral Reasoning
Morality
o A framework for decisions about how to treat one another, how to co-exist
and how to co-operate
Moral Reasoning
o Conscious process of judgment about whether actions or individuals are
right, good and deserving of reward or wrong, bad and deserving of
punishment.
Piaget on Moral Judgment in Children
How do children acquire the rules for moral behaviour?
o Piaget did not think that right and wrong was learned through identification.
This is because he believed that if this was the case then their morals would
not change.
Focused on moral reasoning not moral behaviour
Detailed observations of children’s games of marbles
Young children are Moral Realists
o “The letter rather than the spirit of the law shall be observed”
o Focus on conformity and consequences rather than motives
Henry is seen as more naughty which is
seen as a developmentally appropriate
response.
Piaget categorised children’s answers to the vignettes:
o Objective responsibility – evaluation in terms of material consequences
rather than motive
o Subjective responsibility – evaluation in terms of motive rather than material
consequences
Up to age 7 – objective responsibility – focused on the objective outcome rather
than the motive
From age 9 – subjective responsibility – concerned with the intention rather than the
number of cups that are broken
Moral realism replaced by moral subjectivism
Emergence of autonomous morality around 12 years – children start being able to
make up their own rules and systems as to what is judged as right and wrong.
Moral reasoning as part of domain general cognitive development
Moral reasoning develops as part of our underlying skills
, Cognitive shortcomings in the pre-operational and concrete operations stage of
development
o Egocentrism – focus on one’s own perspective – make it hard to shift into
subjective responsibility
o Realism – seeing contents of one’s own mind as real and external – sees laws
as out there and they can’t be changed
Development occurs through social interaction and equilibration.
Evaluating Piaget’s Evidence
Weiner & Peter (1973)
o Large scale study of ethnically diverse groups of children aged
between 4 and 18
o Simplified Piaget’s stories and just asked them to give a gold
star for good behaviour and a red star for bad behaviour.
o Reward for good intention increases across age as does
punishment for bad intention (particularly age 6-7)
o Piaget may have got the ages slightly wrong since his stories
were longer and more complicated. (only a possibility)
Parsons et al. (1976): Methodological Challenges
o Children may have been distracted by the new information –
recency effect.
o Information about the outcome follows information about intent
o When order is reversed, there is an effect on evaluation
o Order effects might influence young children’s decisions to reward or punish
a character.
Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development
Lawrence Kohlberg undertook extensive research on children’s moral reasoning in
response to dilemmas.
Features of Kohlberg’s Theory:
o Constructivist theory – children actively build their own moral reasoning rules
o Stage theory – invariant sequence – there is a definite developmental stage
so once you have achieved a stage you cannot go back to a different stage.
o Universal approach – happens to all humans across the world at any
particular time.
Kohlberg’s Method – Moral Dilemmas
In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug
that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same
town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was
charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and
charged $2000 for a small dose of the drug.
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