Development of children’s prosocial moral judgment

The purposes of this study were (a) to examine the development of children's reasoning about prosocial moral dilemmas (dilemmas in which the needs of one individual conflict with those of others in a context in which the effects of laws, rules, punishment, authorities, and formal obligations are minimized or irrelevant), and (b) to determine the relationship of structure of prosocial moral judgment to story solution. One hundred twenty-five elementary and high school students responded to four moral dilemmas involving prosocial conflicts. Elementary school children's reasoning tended to be hedonistic, stereotyped, approval and interpersonally oriented, and/or tended to involve the labeling of others ' needs. Stereotyped images of persons and interperson-ally or approval-oriented reasoning decreased in frequency with age, whereas clearly empathic considerations and judgments reflecting internalized values increased in use with age. Empathic moral concerns comprised much of the subjects ' moral reasoning. Finally, type of moral judgment was related to the way subjects said a moral conflict should be resolved. Although research utilizing Kohlberg's (1969, 1971) schema of moral judgment has greatly expanded our understanding of chil-dren's moral reasoning, most of this research has dealt with only one domain of moral judgment, that of prohibition-oriented rea-soning. In nearly all of Kohlberg's dilemmas, laws, rules, authorities, and formal obliga-tions are salient concerns and frequently dominate the individual's reasoning about the conflicts. Only recently have researchers begun both to differentiate the moral realm from the realm of social convention (Damon, 1977; Turiel, 1975) and to examine various This article is based on parts of a thesis submitte