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Conceptions of Moral, Social‐Conventional, and Personal Events Among Chinese Preschoolers in Hong Kong
Author(s) -
Yau Jenny,
Smetana Judith G.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8624.00560
Subject(s) - psychology , punishment (psychology) , moral development , morality , developmental psychology , social psychology , moral disengagement , power (physics) , moral standards , social cognitive theory of morality , law , physics , quantum mechanics , political science
Sixty‐one Chinese preschoolers from Hong Kong at 2 ages ( Ms = 4.36 and 6.00 years) were interviewed about familiar moral, social‐conventional, and personal events. Children treated personal events as distinct from moral obligations and conventional regulations. Children judged the child as deciding personal issues, based on personal choice justifications, whereas children judged parents as deciding moral and conventional issues. With age, children granted increased decision‐making power to the child. In contrast, children viewed moral transgressions as more serious, generalizably wrong, and wrong independent of authority than other events, based on welfare and fairness. Punishment‐avoidance justifications for conventional events decreased with age, whereas conventional justifications increased. Young Chinese preschool children make increasingly differentiated judgments about their social world.