How Do Children Make Moral Judgments?

One of the most complicated parenting problems is how to teach children the difference between right and wrong. This is partly because adult role models need to set a consistent example if that is what the goal is. Before teaching them the difference between right and wrong, it is important to understand how children make moral judgments in the first place.

Until relatively recently, people believed that young children were not able to make appropriate moral judgments because they did not take into account certain factors, such as intentions. But research has shown that children are able to consider right and wrong much more as adults than we previously thought.

In the 1930s, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, known for his theory of cognitive development, explained that children go through three stages of moral reasoning as they mature. Psychologists who followed him have also studied how moral development takes place and how children think about right and wrong.

To study moral reasoning, Piaget presented short stories to children. After gathering their responses to various scenarios with morality, Piaget concluded that children are unable to assess the person’s intentions when judging how moral their decisions are. Instead, they focus on the actual events that happened.

Decades later, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg came up with his own theory of moral development. He presented moral dilemmas to children to determine how they think about right and wrong.

According to Kohlberg, children between 2 and 10 mention the associated punishments and rewards when making moral judgments. If an action is punished, it is wrong. However, the answer to how children think about right and wrong is not so simple.

Do intentions matter to children?

Do children really not include intentions in the calculation? Recent studies show that Piaget and Kohlberg’s theories of moral development are deceptive. They show that if the researchers emphasize the character’s intentions throughout the story, using pictures and toys to help them understand, then the children incorporate intentions into their assessments.

One reason that intentions must have a clear weight is that it is difficult for children to remember every detail. If you do not ask them to remember the intentions behind a person’s actions, they will base their assessments on the last aspect of the story: the result.

But to what extent are intentions and results important for children? Research on both children and adults suggests that one’s assessment of an intention may change, depending on the outcome of the action.

Our belief in the intentions of others depends on whether the outcome of the action was good or bad. If an action has negative results, it is more likely that both children and adults think it was the intention.

Right and wrong according to indirect consequences

Why are children and adults more likely to say that actions with negative side effects are intentional? One possible answer has to do with violations of norms. The philosopher Richard Holton said that our intuitions about the intentions of others are explained by whether the action breaks or maintains a norm.

If it violates an established norm, we believe that the action is intentional. On the other hand, if it maintains a norm, we do not see it as intentional. We think that people follow norms without much effort, but make a conscious effort to violate them.

This is known as the Knobe effect. There is a peculiar asymmetry in the attribution of intention with respect to the expected effects of people’s actions. Everything is the same, bad results are believed to be deliberately produced, but not good.

How children make moral judgments

Recent studies suggest that children’s moral reasoning is more complicated than we had thought. The first few studies that used moral dilemmas were erroneous because they were too complex. In addition, the researchers did not fully understand children’s cognitive abilities.

Recent studies say that children match the adult’s tendency to balance intentions with results in their moral judgments. That is, when questions become style clear and in a way that children can understand.