This study examined how children's and adolescents' beliefs about the distribution of wealth in society and the fairness of economic systems informed their behavior, judgments, and reasoning about access to opportunities among peers. The sample included 136 8- to 14-year-olds (47% girls, 60% White, majority middle- to higher-socioeconomic status…

Research on the Happy Victimizer Phenomenon has mainly focused on preschool and schoolchildren, with a few studies also including adolescents and young adults. The main finding is that young children, despite knowing that harming someone is wrong, ascribe positive feelings to perpetrators and offer hedonistic justifications, interpreted as a lack…

Video games have the potential to be contexts for moral learning. We investigated whether "Quandary," a video game designed to promote ethical thinking and moral considerations for decision-making, would help promote positive skills such as perspective taking and empathy in adolescents. We examined the effect of playing…

This study investigated different facets of moral development in bullies, victims, and bully-victims among Swiss adolescents. Extending previous research, we focused on both bullying and victimization in relation to adolescents' morally disengaged and morally responsible reasoning as well as moral emotion attributions. A total of 516 adolescents…

The assumptions of Kohlberg, Turiel and Shweder regarding the features of moral reasoning were compared empirically. The moral reasoning of Finnish Evangelical Lutheran, Conservative Laestadian and non-religious adolescents was studied using Kohlberg's Moral Judgment Interview and Turiel Rule Transgression Interview methods. Religiosity and choice…

We respond to the commentary by Brusten, Stams, and Gibbs (2007) on the research by Tarry and Emler (2007), arguing for the appropriateness of key design decisions--studying delinquency as assessed by self-report in a sample of 12- to 15-year-old males. We argue that "known-group" methods for assessing involvement in delinquency, the major…

The nature of moral problems as formulated by gifted adolescents was examined. Stories written by students in grades 9-12 were analyzed in terms of the age and sex of characters, social relationships between characters, issues in the moral problems, and solutions to the problems. (Author/AM)

The nature of the developmental shift from adolescence to adulthood has been of ongoing interest to researchers studying the development of socio-moral cognition from within the "cognitive-developmental" paradigm. This paper identifies three dimensions along which developmental changes in socio-moral cognition occur during late…

Kohlberg's developmental theory of moral reasoning hypothesizes that the socially unacceptable moral behavior of many juvenile delinquents is related to immature moral reasoning. A sizeable minority of delinquents, however, has been shown to reason at age-appropriate levels. This study examined issues related to those juvenile delinquents who were…

The hypotheses that moral judgment increases with age and that the maturity level of values and reasons for perceiving them as values increases with older age groups in the population of mentally subnormal children were tested. The hypotheses were only partially confirmed. (Author/AM)

This literature review examines the potential of selective recall for assessing level of moral reasoning. Rest's Defining Issues Test was administered to five individuals to test the applicability of certain principles of selective recall in assessing moral reasoning. (IAH)

In this study, reasoning about moral responsibilities in friendships on the part of 97 subjects was assessed at the ages of 7, 9, 12, and 15 years. Assessment was undertaken of: (1) general reasoning about the moral obligation of promise keeping; (2) general reasoning about responsibilities in friendship; and (3) situation-specific reasoning about…

At age 13, and for the next 20 years, male subjects were periodically interviewed about their moral judgments. Adolescents with mature use of defense mechanisms reasoned at higher stages of moral judgment 10 to 20 years after the initial interview than did those with immature use of defense mechanisms. (BC)

Investigated moral judgment delay in adolescent delinquents based on sex differences and specific moral value areas. Found that delinquents of both sexes were, on average, developmentally delayed in moral judgment, particularly on values related to the law. However, they rated values such as promise keeping, helping others, and saving life as…

Presents a theoretical perspective for the psychological study of moral development which does not rely on the notion that different types of moral view have different logical structures and which provides a framework for specific predictions about moral content and moral reasoning, motivation, and behavior. (Author/RH)