YOUR DEVELOPMENTMoral development
The early signs of altruism speak to another area of child psychology
- moral development – about which modern findings are also over-
turning traditional thought. Piaget, Freud, and the moral-development
expert Lawrence Kohlberg, all believed that children don’t fully under-
stand morality until adolescence or even beyond. Indeed, influenced
by Piaget, Kohlberg proposed a theory of moral development based on
the levels: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional, each
of which was further broken down into two stages. Kohlberg measured
children’s and young people’s progress through the stages and levels
according to their responses to moral dilemmas such as whether and
why a man, Heinz, should break into a chemist’s to obtain an over-
priced treatment for his wife’s cancer. Only when they reach the second
and final stage of level three (the “universal ethical principals orienta-
tion”), which Kohlberg said happens from the mid-thirties onwards, do
people rely on their own conscience with reference to universal moral
principles, such as justice and the sanctity of human life.
The idea that morality takes time to develop is a view that’s enshrined
in many legal systems, and children are not expected to have a deep
understanding of right and wrong. Piaget specifically argued that
when judging the morality of an action, children younger than ten or
eleven focus almost exclusively on outcomes and fail to take intentions
into account, as adults do. According to Piaget, young children would
consider a girl who breaks ten glasses attempting to reach a cookie for
her mother as morally worse than a girl who broke one glass while in
the process of attempting to steal a cookie.
In 2009, however, Gavin Nobes at the University of East Anglia and
his colleagues appeared to show that young children do in fact take
intentions into account – it’s just that it can appear as though they don’t
because they haven’t yet fully grasped the concept of negligence. Again,
the argument isn’t that moral reasoning is fully developed in childhood,
it’s just that the experts of the past hadn’t fully uncovered the early
building blocks of children’s understanding.
Nobes’s team presented dozens of children aged between three and
eight years with illustrated stories involving bicycle crashes, dropped
cups and games of catch, after which they asked the kids for their views
on each protagonist’s culpability and deserved punishment. A key differ-
ence from traditional research was that half the time the kids were told