Moral Judgments in Parochial and Public School Second-Graders

1983 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 579-585 ◽  
Author(s):  
James D. Moran ◽  
Marge S. Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
School Children ◽  
Second Graders ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Parochial School ◽  
Group Cohesiveness ◽  
Property Damage ◽  
Personal Property ◽  
Story Content

This study compared the moral judgments of 22 parochial school second-graders and 20 public school children of similar age and intelligence. The children were read 12 moral judgment stories of either positive consequence and negative intention or negative intention and positive consequence. Story content included either damage to personal property, damage to the property of others, or damage to persons. Analysis of variance conducted on ratings of story characters showed that public and parochial school children differed in their judgments as a function of story content. In general, parochial students made more intention-based judgments than did public school children. This tendency was especially evident in stories involving damage to persons with negative outcomes and with negative intent and positive consequence stories involving personal property damage and damage to the property of others. The data indicate that both environmental influences and the situational story context influence moral judgments. It is suggested that the group cohesiveness of the parochial school may account for the greater use of intention by these children.

Influence of Structured Group Experience on Moral Judgments of Preschoolers

1983 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 587-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
James D. Moran ◽  
Gayle O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Social Environment ◽  
Day Care ◽  
Nursery School ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Personal Property ◽  
Formal Program ◽  
The Social ◽  
Group Experience ◽  
At Home

Moral judgment stories were read to preschoolers who were either in day care or nursery school ( n = 20) or at home, not attending any formal program ( n = 15). The group-care children focused more on intention in contexts involving injury to another person but tended to be more consequence-based in contexts involving personal property damage than the group at home. These data suggest the influence of the social environment on moral judgments.

Is Empathy Required for Making Moral Judgments?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Deigh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Psychopathic Personality ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Psychological Profile ◽  
Main Thesis ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Additional Support

This essay is a study of the nature of moral judgment. Its main thesis is that moral judgment is a type of judgment defined by its content and not its psychological profile. The essay arrives at this thesis through a critical examination of Hume’s sentimentalism and the role of empathy in its account of moral judgment. The main objection to Hume’s account is its exclusion of people whom one can describe as making moral judgments though they have no motivation to act on them. Consideration of such people, particularly those with a psychopathic personality, argues for a distinction between different types of moral judgment in keeping with the essay’s main thesis. Additional support for the main thesis is then drawn from Piaget’s theory of moral judgment in children.

Effect of Power on Moral Judgment

1978 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 387-394
Author(s):  
Russell Hamby
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Low Power ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Factorial Design ◽  
High Power ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Need For Power ◽  
Experimenter Effects

Ambiguous effects of power on attributions of moral responsibility for an accident are interpreted to result from the intervening effects of need for power, which is aroused by the anticipation of exercising power over another. 160 subjects from introductory social psychology classes participated in a questionnaire-type experiment comparing effects of high/low carelessness, severe/minor consequences, and high/low power of the attributor in a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design. In a follow-up experiment 30 subjects were assigned to conditions of high or low power, and their needs for power and moral attributions were measured. High power seemed to arouse need for power, which was curvilinearly related to moral judgments. Those high and low in need for power attributed more moral responsibility to the perpetrator of an accident than those with moderate levels of need for power. The results suggest complicated models of both moral judgments and experimenter effects related to the level or arousal of motivations.

scholarly journals Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment

2016 ◽  
Vol 113 (17) ◽  
pp. 4688-4693 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Clark Barrett ◽  
Alexander Bolyanatz ◽  
Alyssa N. Crittenden ◽  
Daniel M. T. Fessler ◽  
Simon Fitzpatrick ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Narrow Range ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Moral Assessment ◽  
Mitigating Circumstances

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment.

Sex Differences in Cooperative and Competitive Attitudes in a Northeastern School

1982 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 768-770 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara K. Herndon ◽  
Mary D. Carpenter
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Public School ◽  
School Children ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Region Of Residence ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Main Effects

Competitiveness and cooperativeness of children in the Northeast were compared to those same attitudes in the Midwest. 102 middle- to upper-class suburban public school children in Grades 2 through 6 were given the Minnesota School Affect Assessment. Contrary to former findings, competitiveness in all grades increased with age. There were main effects for sex for both attitudes. It is proposed that region of residence contributed to the difference found.

Developmental Study of Moral Judgments by Japanese Children

1991 ◽  
Vol 68 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1131-1136
Author(s):  
Hirotsugu Yamauchi
Keyword(s):  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Causal Attribution ◽  
Helping Behavior ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Developmental Study ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Frequency Data ◽  
Japanese Children ◽  
Dual Scaling ◽  
Evaluative Feedback

The purpose of this study was to examine the determinants of causal attribution in the contexts of moral judgment and the developmental shifts of the determinants. Subjects were children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 ( ns = 83, 122, and 84). Moral judgments were measured by asking subjects to provide “evaluative feedback” to an hypothetical child's helping behavior. The method of dual scaling was applied to the frequency data of moral judgments. Two-dimensional solutions show that subjects judged whether the hypothetical child should be rewarded or punished and what amount of reward or punishment was given to the hypothetical child. Developmental shifts were found for moral judgment.

scholarly journals Vision for the Future Project: Screening impact on the prevention and treatment of visual impairments in public school children in São Paulo City, Brazil

Clinics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Rodrigues da Costa ◽  
Iara Debert ◽  
Fernanda Nicolela Susanna ◽  
Janaina Guerra Falabreti ◽  
Mariza Polati ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public School ◽  
School Children ◽  
Visual Impairments ◽  
Sao Paulo ◽  
São Paulo ◽  
Prevention And Treatment ◽  
The Future ◽  
Project Screening ◽  
Future Project

scholarly journals Famine, Affluence, and Amorality

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
David Sackris
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Moral Judgment ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
First Person ◽  
Moral Decision ◽  
Moral Decision Making ◽  
Distinct Kind ◽  
Ordinary Case ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Way

I argue that the debate concerning the nature of first-person moral judgment, namely, whether such moral judgments are inherently motivating (internalism) or whether moral judgments can be made in the absence of motivation (externalism), may be founded on a faulty assumption: that moral judgments form a distinct kind that must have some shared, essential features in regards to motivation to act. I argue that there is little reason to suppose that first-person moral judgments form a homogenous class in this respect by considering an ordinary case: student readers of Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”. Neither internalists nor externalists can provide a satisfying account as to why our students fail to act in this particular case, but are motivated to act by their moral judgments in most cases. I argue that the inability to provide a satisfying account is rooted in this shared assumption about the nature of moral judgments. Once we consider rejecting the notion that first-person moral decision- making forms a distinct kind in the way it is typically assumed, the internalist/externalist debate may be rendered moot.

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