Children's evaluations of morality in the context of peer, teacher-child, and familial relations

Adolescents' emotion attributions and expectations of behavior in situations involving moral conflict

This study examined the idea that expectations of behavior in hypothetical situations involving potential moral transgressions are related to emotion attributions relating to both moral and cost-benefit considerations. We asked younger (14 years 5 months) and older (16 years 1 month) female and male adolescents (a) to make predictions about the probability that an adolescent placed in a hypothetical situation where a payoff could be obtained by acting in a nonmoral way would choose to do so and (b) to evaluate adolescents' attributions of moral (guilt) and cost-benefit-related emotions (satisfaction and fear) to the nonmoral action. Two different situations were examined; one looked at the possibility of stealing money from a lost wallet, and the other examined a situation where a contract with another peer could be broken for personal reasons. Results showed that expectations that the nonmoral action would be taken were positively related to the degree of satisfaction and negatively related to the degree of guilt and fear. However, the pattern of relations between emotion attributions and behavioral expectations differed between the two situations. Female and male adolescents had different levels of emotion attributions and behavioral expectations, but the relation between the two was similar for both. Finally, developmental comparisons indicated that older adolescents put more weight on guilt and were more internally consistent in the way that emotions were integrated into behavioral expectations.

Social reasoning: a source of influence on aggression

Aggressive children show deficits and biases in their social information processing. Cognitions based on early experience and social schemas are also related to development and maintenance of aggressive behavior. Social reasoning can be linked to these aspects of social cognition, impacting on the situational cues individuals encode, their interpretations of events, and influencing response decisions. Past experience also influences development of social reasoning and social schema. Despite this, current discussion of the links between cognition and aggression rarely involves consideration of the influence of social reasoning. In this review, domain theory (E. Turiel, 1978, 1983) underpins an examination of links between social reasoning and aggression using empirical evidence drawn from research on the social reasoning of normal and aggressive children. Children as young as 3 appear to use consistent patterns of social reasoning when making judgments about transgressions and other social events, and these patterns are linked to social reasoning domains. We propose that aggressive children access information from the underlying social reasoning domains differently than their prosocial peers. This in turn affects their decision making and subsequent behavior in social situations. Our review explores developmental and clinical implications of the proposal and provides directions for future research.

Children's, adolescents', and young adults' thinking about different types of disagreements

Individuals' thinking about different types of disagreements was examined. Ninety-six participants in third grade (mean age = 8 years 9 months), seventh grade (mean age = 13 years 2 months), and college (mean age = 21 years 10 months) judged the acceptability of believing and acting on different types of beliefs with which they disagree, the attributes of the persons with whom they disagree, and the relative importance of cultural uniformity or diversity of belief. Findings indicated that participants' thinking did not simply become more tolerant with age; their thinking at all ages was constrained by both the realm over which there was disagreement and the form of the disagreement. At all ages, participants judged that some disagreements were acceptable and some unacceptable, described disagreeing others in terms of different (more or less positive) attributes, and judged that diversity of belief was important in some realms but uniformity was preferable in others.

Adolescents' and young adults' conceptions of civil liberties: freedom of speech and religion

This study examined adolescents' and young adults' conceptions of freedom of speech and religion (civil liberties). 48 adolescents and young adults in 3 grade levels (mean ages 12-8, 16-10, and 19-6) were administered a structured interview containing assessments of civil liberties in general, in straightforward (unconflicted) applications, and in conflict with other social and moral concerns, including law, physical and psychological harm, and equality of opportunity. Freedom of speech and religion were conceptualized as universal rights and applied to social events in unconflicted contexts at all ages. A diverse array of rationales, differentiated according to type of freedom, were used at all ages to ground conceptions of universal freedoms. Judgments of civil liberties in conflicts exhibited several sources of variation, including developmental differences, situational or contextual variation determined by the particular types of issues in conflict, and individual differences. Results are consistent with the proposition that judgments of civil liberties reflect age-related patterns of coordination of delimited social and moral concepts rather than general orientations.