Social Class Differences in Conscience Development

The Relationship Between Moral Judgment, Causal Reasoning and General Reasoning

“…This result was not surprising since most studies of children aged six to twelve years thus far report contradictory findings for the relationship between moral judgment and IQ (Boehm and Nass, 1962). IQ was not significantly related to either the general reasoning or the causal judgment task.…”

“…In general, previous findings report age to be the only consistently operative factor in the development toward maturity of moral judgment.' (Boehm andNass, 1962, p566) Lerner (1937), for example, used six to thirteenyear-olds and found that * up to eight or nine years, the moral judgment of the child is clearly " realistic "... after eight or nine years . .…”

Conscience Development in Mentally Retarded Adolescents

“…Piaget's ideas have been studied in different civilized societies (see reference to this research in Boehm and Nass, 1962). These studies have all shown that for normal children more mature moral responses, which consider intention rather than result, are given by older children (Boehm & Nass, 1962).…”

Stage Acquisition and Stage Use

“…The results of several studies (Armsby, 1971;Bandura and McDonald, 1963;Boehm and Nass, 1962;Cowan etal., 1969;Durkin, 1959Durkin, , 1961Garbarino arid Bronfenbrenner, 1976;Holstein, 1976;Johnson, 1962;Keasey, \91S;L e Furgy and Woloshin, 1969;MacRae, 1954;Magowan and Lee, 1970;Medinnas, 1959) and the analyses of several reviewers (Aronfreed, 1976;Bull, 1969;Douglas, 1972;Graham, 1972;Kay, 1970;Lickona, 1969Lickona, , 1976Mischel and Mischel, 1976;Simpson, 1974) indicate that response variation in moral reasoning can be a function of factors in addition to those covert conditions of disequilibrium thought to underly the phenomenon of stage mixture. Many of the above articles report person and task effects on moral reasoning and as such appear to support Kurtines and Grief's (1974, p. 467) assertion that 'modes of moral thought are subject to social influence'.…”