Early research from pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget identified distinct stages of moral reasoning as children develop. Piaget's model saw young children in a stage of relatively black-and-white moral reasoning, where all rules are equally important. As they mature, the children would gradually shift to a different moral perspective that adds more grey areas, where some rules become more flexible.
This study followed a different line of research called social-domain theory, which suggests that even young children can differentiate between different kinds of moral transgressions. And the severity of the transgression depends on the context. Children judge moral transgressions, which are actions that harm others (such as hitting), most harshly. Social-conventional transgressions, which upset the social order (such as talking out of turn), are also seen as immoral, but are judged less harshly. Finally, most kids are hesitant to pass judgement on personal choices (such as clothing choices) and are unlikely to consider them as moral transgressions.
This study also explored children's reasoning for their moral viewpoints. Research indicates that there are two main types of reasons given for people's attitudes toward nature: Anthropocentric justifications that center around how the environment affects people (for example, opposing water pollution because it threatens humans' water supply) and biocentric views that lend moral standing to nature itself (for example, believing that a waterway should remain unpolluted for its own sake, and not because of the human benefits of clean water). Some previous research has indicated that biocentric reasoning may not develop until later childhood.
In this study, the authors hoped to understand whether children viewed environmentally harmful actions as similar to moral transgressions, social-conventional transgressions, or personal choices. And they also wanted to know how the children explain their reasoning: would they express anthropocentric or biocentric reasoning?
The authors interviewed 61 children between the ages of 6 and 10 who were not randomly selected (the interviewer used a snowball sampling technique, asking participating children if they knew anyone else who might like to participate). All of the children lived in suburban areas of the Northeastern United States, and all but five were Caucasian. The researchers presented the children with twelve story cards that depicted three moral transgressions (stealing a quarter, pushing a classmate, and grabbing a toy); three social transgressions (eating salad with fingers, not pushing in a chair after class dismissal, and leaving a dirty wrapper on the table after snack); three personal choices (eating lunch with a certain group of friends, reading at recess, and coloring with a purple crayon); and three environmentally harmful actions (littering, not recycling, and damaging a tree). The researchers asked the children to rate the actions depicted on the card as “OK,” “a little bad,” or “very bad” and later converted their responses to a 0-to-2 scale, where 0 represented “OK” and 2 represented “very bad.” The researchers also asked the students to explain their answer, and noted if the response reflected anthropocentric or biocentric reasoning.
The results confirm a more nuanced approach to moral reasoning among children. The children in the study “judged moral transgressions more severely than social-conventional transgressions and rarely condemned personal choices.” When it came to environmentally harmful acts, children judged them more harshly than social-conventional transgressions, but not as harshly as moral transgressions. The authors think one way to interpret these results is that “these children may be conveying a belief that harm to the environment is bad, but harm to a human being is worse.” In addition, the authors report that “Although typically thought to emerge later in adolescence, a willingness to grant nature respect based upon its own unique right-to-existence was present in our young participants.” Though, they note, girls were more likely to hold a biocentric view than boys among the children in their sample.
The authors conclude that their results could signal the existence of a new domain, which they say is “one incorporating environmental concerns as less acute than humanitarian concerns but more important than concerns about arbitrary social conventions.” More research with a larger, more diverse sample would need to be conducted to confirm the results.
The Bottom Line
<p>This research confirms previous research that suggests that children's moral reasoning is more nuanced than once thought. And, importantly, the environment received moral standing among the children in this study, who were an average of 8 years old. The children rated the severity of environmental transgressions such as littering as more severe than social transgressions, but less severe than moral transgressions such as stealing. Children--girls more often than boys--also expressed a biocentric view, in which nature deserved respect in its own right and not just because of its connection to people. This was a very small study, however, and more research needs to be done to confirm the results.</p>
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