THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYthat a protagonist had taken care, whereas the rest of the time they
were told that he or she had been reckless – for example, by trying to
carry a tower of cups in one hand. Contrary to Piaget, the researchers
found that overall, children, like adults, mostly based their moral judge-
ments on whether a protagonist intended to cause harm. According to
the researchers, the reason that the children’s judgements sometimes
diverged from the adults’ is because, when bad outcomes occurred, they
often failed to recognize as a mitigating factor the fact that a protagonist
had taken care. To the children, a bad outcome meant the protagonist
must have been negligent, even when they’d been told he or she had
been careful. But as Nobes’s team pointed out, this is an issue of delayed
practical, not moral, understanding.
In another demonstration of children’s advanced moral understanding,
research published in the 1980s showed that young children can even tell
the difference between the breaking of “arbitrary” social rules and actual
harm. Judith Smetana, then at Rochester University, asked children aged
between two and a half and nine years to judge the seriousness of a number
of transgressions, including the breaking of school rules (such as wearing
pyjamas to school) and morally bad acts (such as a hitting another child).
Even the youngest children said that harmful acts were more serious than
the breaking of rules, and they said that it would be wrong to hurt someone
even if the rules said that you could. This contradicts Piaget’s claim that
young children are only able to see rules as fixed and absolute.
Although the Russian psychologist
Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934) died
young, and his major work
Thought and Language wasn’t
translated into English until the
early 1960s, his ideas about the
importance of social interaction
in children’s development have
been highly influential. Vygotsky
emphasized that learning doesn’t
take place in a social vacuum.
In particular, he argued that
children’s abilities are initially
nurtured with the help of parents
and teachers before becoming
fully mastered – what he called the
“zone of proximal development”.
His ideas have influenced
educational practices, for example
by highlighting the value of group
work and peer learning.