the moral choices children attribute to adults and peers: implications for moral acquisition herbert...
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The Moral Choices Children Attribute to Adults and Peers: Implications for moral acquisitionHerbert D. SaltzsteinGraduate Center of the City University of New York, USAAntonio Roazzi and Maria da Grac,a B. B. DiasGraduate Program in Psychology, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil AbstractThirty-six children (half 6-8 years old, and half 10-12, half boys and half girls) in Northeast Brazil were presented with three hypothetical dilemmas (involving peers teasing a friend, a sibling hiding from parents and a friend’s cheating at school) featuring a choice between telling the truth and keeping a promise. They were asked to choose between truth-telling or promise-keeping, and to attribute choices to adults and to peers. Orders of dilemmas and of judgments were counter-balanced, and had no effect. Neither did gender. More younger children than older children chose truth on all three dilemmas. Regression analysis showed that "peer judgments" predicted own judgments on all three dilemmas, but "adult judgments" did so only on one dilemma (teasing), paradoxically the one in which no adult figured in the story. SSA analysis showed: (1) an axial partition both for the dilemmas facet placing the hiding story between the other two dilemmas) and for the type of judgement facet with own judgement in the middle, between those attributed to adults and to peers; but; (2) there was a greater similarity between own and judgments attributed to peers than between own judgments and those attributed to adults, confirmed by the finding that judgments attributed to peers predicted own judgments more than judgments attributed to adults did; (3) Although adult judgments were, in general, located farther from the other two judgments than they were from each other, the adult-own pair judgment were closer for the teasing dilemma than for the other two dilemmas. The results pose a problem for those theories which explain moral development as involving a conscious copying by children of adult beliefs. The findings may be interpreted as consistent with (a) a constructivist account of development, whereby children construct moral concepts themselves primarily from peer interaction, or (b) by assuming that children acquire moral concepts from adults, but do so outside of conscious awareness by a kind of implicit acquisition process.TRANSCRIPT
