Student Study Guide
Chapter 11
Morality: Knowing Right, Doing Good
Chapter Outline
MORAL JUDGMENT
PIAGET’S COGNITIVE THEORY OF MORAL JUDGMENT
Stages of Moral Reasoning
Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory
KOHLBERG’S COGNITIVE THEORY OF MORAL JUDGMENT
Levels and Stages of Moral Judgment
Insights from Extremes: Moral Heroes
Limitations of Kohlberg’s Theory
New Aspects of Moral Development
Cultural Context: Justice versus Interpersonal Obligations in India and the United States
TURIEL’S SOCIAL DOMAIN THEORY
Social Conventional Domain
Psychological Domain
Judgments about Complex Issues
HOW CHILDREN LEARN THE RULES AND DISTINGUISH BETWEEN SOCIAL DOMAINS
Parents’ and Teachers’ Roles in Moral and Social Conventional Reasoning
Sibling and Peer Influences on Moral and Conventional Judgments
The Role of Culture
MORAL BEHAVIOR
Bet You Thought That . . . Moral Judgment Leads to Moral Action
SELF-REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN MORAL BEHAVIOR
Into Adulthood: The Love of Money Is the Root of All Evil
CONSISTENCY OF MORAL BEHAVIOR ACROSS SITUATIONS AND TIME
Research Up Close: Children Telling Lies
MORAL EMOTIONS
DEVELOPMENT OF MORAL EMOTIONS
Moral Emotions and Child Characteristics
Moral Emotions and Parents’ Behavior
DO MORAL EMOTIONS AFFECT MORAL BEHAVIOR?
Real-World Application: Adolescents’ Competence to Stand Trial As Adults
THE WHOLE MORAL CHILD
PROSOCIAL AND ALTRUISTIC BEHAVIOR
HOW PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND REASONING DEVELOP
Age Changes in Prosocial Behavior
Stability in Styles of Prosocial Behavior
Prosocial Reasoning
Are Girls More Prosocial Than Boys?
DETERMINANTS OF PROSOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Biological Influences
Environmental Influences
Cultural Influences
Empathy and Perspective Taking
Chapter Summary
Key Terms
At the Movies
Many movies illuminate moral issues. They vividly convey moral—or immoral—acts, portray
moral and immoral characters, and provoke the audience to think deeply about morality. Those
noted here are just a few of such movies.
Moral Heroes--Gandhi (1982) is a biography of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who used
nonviolent civil disobedience to end the subjugation of the Indian people. Gandhi was one of the
few individuals whom Kohlberg considered to exemplify the abstract principles of justice and
equality found in Stage 6 moral reasoning. His leadership and example inspired many people and
many governments throughout the world to have higher levels of morality. Other movies focus
on the moral behavior of less known individuals.
Ordinary Moral Models--A Dry White Season (1989) is the story of a white man in South
Africa who is awakened to the brutality and injustice of apartheid. Hotel Rwanda (2004) focuses
on the hotel manager who protected more than 1200 people from killers’ machetes in the
Rwandan genocide in 1994. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) follows college student
Sophie Scholl’s last 6 days from the time she was arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets until
she was found guilty of treason and executed. All these true stories challenge you to evaluate
your own strength of moral character. Would you risk your life the way these people did?
Moral Reasoning--A movie that contrasts different levels of moral reasoning in the United
States is Gone Baby Gone (2007). A little girl has been kidnapped, and a massive search is
conducted to find her. The child’s aunt enlists the aid of a private detective. The movie contrasts
the absolute moral standard espoused by that detective: “Murder’s wrong, plain and simple,” with
the situational moral standard expressed by some police officers: “Depends on who you’re
killing.” This movie is more than just a crime drama about the unethical methods by which some
cops solve crimes; it is a moral tale suggesting the superiority of developing community through
empathy, cooperation, and concern about the lives of other people.
Prosocial Behavior--Moral issues are not always embedded in stories about life and death,
crime, and crisis, however; they are also expressed in fiction and fantasy. Groundhog Day (1993)
is a hilarious movie with a moral message: Doing good has benefits. Pay it Forward (2000) has
the same message. The pay-it-forward concept came from the personal experience of the woman
who wrote the novel and adapted it for the screen. When her car caught fire at the side of a road,
two men put out the fire, but before she could thank them, they disappeared. She later returned
the favor by helping a woman stranded at the side of the road, and instead of accepting thanks,
she asked the stranger to pay it forward to the next person in need of help. Although this movie is
pure Hollywood, the notion of paying it forward reinforces the idea that individuals are
responsible for the welfare of the community and encourages an optimistic and prosocial outlook
on life. Today, the Pay It Forward Foundation focuses on inspiring and assisting young people to
make a positive contribution to society.
Learning from Living Leaders: Chapter 11 Morality: Knowing Right, Doing Good
Elliot Turiel
Elliot Turiel is Professor of Education at the University of California at Berkeley. After deciding
to be a psychologist in his junior year of college, his career path was set during graduate school at
Yale when he discovered Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential work on children’s moral reasoning.
His goal since then has been to discover how human beings develop understandings of right and
wrong and how morality can be distinguished from other types of norms and preferences.
He is widely recognized for his pioneering insight that morality is distinguished early in
childhood from social conventions and customs and for his discovery of the different types of
social experiences that contribute to different domains of judgment. His formulation of social
domain theory, a framework that recognizes the different domains of social development, is his
proudest accomplishment. His recent work concerns how people deal with institutionalized
injustices that go against their moral judgments. His interest in morality and justice was inspired
by his own early childhood experiences in Greece during World War II when he benefited from
the actions of individuals who were willing to resist the social system and combat persons in
power and authority who were engaging in serious injustices.
Turiel is esteemed around the globe for his work; he is past president of the Jean Piaget
society and an honorary member of the Italian Society for Research in Child Development. His
hope for the future is that researchers will take more seriously the capacity of humans for
reasoning and making moral choices.
Further Reading
Turiel, E. (2006). The development of morality. In W. Damon & R. Lerner (Series Eds.), & N.
Eisenberg (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of child psychology, Vol. 3: Social, emotional, and
personality development (6th ed., pp. 789–857). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Learning from Living Leaders: Chapter 11 Morality: Knowing Right, Doing Good
Judith G. Smetana
Judith Smetana, Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester, earned a bachelor’s
degree from the University of California at Berkeley and master’s and doctoral degrees from the
University of California at Santa Cruz. The overall purpose of her research is to determine how
people form ideas about right and wrong and make moral choices.
In the 1970s and 1980s, she published widely on women’s decision making about
abortion. Since then, she has written about preschoolers’ understanding of right and wrong and
how they distinguish between moral imperatives (stealing is wrong) and social conventions (boys
don’t wear dresses). She is conducting studies of disclosure and secrecy in adolescent–parent
relationships including a daily-diary study of Latino American, African American, and European
American high school students. She is also interested in selfishness and selflessness and how
spirituality, religiosity, compassionate love, and concepts of social justice are related to
adolescents’ civic involvement and service on behalf of others. Experience with her own children
shaped some of her research on selfishness: “It was striking to me how my kids were cited in
their high school as the kind of kids who go out of their way to help other people, and yet at
home they didn’t always act that way with me.” Her work has practical implications because it
helps parents understand why they have conflicts with their adolescent children and how they
can best handle these disputes.
Smetana hopes that in the future researchers will integrate the study of cultural and ethnic
variations in development with the study of basic developmental processes. She received an early
career award from the Foundation for Child Development and recently completed a term as
secretary of the Society for Research in Child Development.
Further Reading
Smetana, J. G., Rote, W. M., Jambon, M., Tasopoulos-Chan, M., Villalobos, M., & Comer,
J. (2012). Developmental changes and individual differences in young children’s moral
judgments. Child Development, 83, 683–696.
Learning from Living Leaders: Chapter 11 Morality: Knowing Right, Doing Good
Grazyna Kochanska
Grazyna Kochanska is Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Iowa. Her
proudest accomplishment is that she overcame the disadvantages and difficulties of arriving in the
United States from Poland and was able to achieve success. With her Ph.D. from the University of
Warsaw she obtained a position at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., where
she pursued an interest in social development, particularly moral behavior. Her focus was on how
children develop a conscience—an inner sense of right and wrong that becomes an effective guide
for conduct—and why some children become callous, disruptive, and antisocial while others
become rule abiding, responsible, prosocial, and regulated. In a series of longitudinal studies, she
showed how family interaction patterns and children’s temperaments contribute to the
development of conscience.
She believes that in the future, research in social-emotional development will involve a
richer integration of constructs measured at multiple levels—from biological to ecological—and
an in-depth understanding of developmental mechanisms and processes over time. Her message
for undergraduate students suggests that a research career is not for everyone: “It is not a leisurely
lifestyle. You should ask yourself: Do you believe you can work very hard all day, every day?
Are you willing to face constant challenges and setbacks and strive hard to overcome them? Do
you enjoy working toward distant, self-imposed goals with little or no immediate gratification?
Do you see research activity as a path of personal commitment rather than ‘work’? If you
answered ‘yes’ to these questions—go for it! If they gave you pause—choose another career.”
Further Reading
Kim, S., & Kochanska, G. (2012). Child temperament moderates effects of parent-child
mutuality on self-regulation: A relationship-based path for emotionally negative infants.
Child Development, 83, 1275–1289.
Learning from Living Leaders: Chapter 11 Morality: Knowing Right, Doing Good
Nancy Eisenberg
Nancy Eisenberg is Regents Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, where she has
been engaged in trying to understand the development of prosocial behavior in children for
several decades. Her graduate studies at the University of California at Berkeley and her early
book The Roots of Prosocial Behavior in Children, made her one of the world’s leading figures
in this area. Her specific goal is to understand the factors that account for individual differences
in children’s altruism, empathy, and sympathy. She uses multiple methods and designs including
psychophysiology, naturalistic observations, lab-based experiments, and cross-cultural
comparisons. Her work has taken her to China, Indonesia, France, and Brazil in search of
commonalities and differences in prosocial understanding and behavior.
One of her proudest achievements was an invitation to share her insights about the origins
of altruism and compassion with the Buddhist spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, in India. A
selection of dialogues from this conference appears in Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists
and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature. She is the founding editor of Child Development
Perspectives, a journal devoted to summaries of new and emerging topics, and is the recipient of
several awards for her scholarly work including the 2007 Ernest R. Hilgard Award for Career
Contribution to General Psychology from the American Psychological Association.
Further Reading
Caprara, G. V., Alessandri, G., & Eisenberg, N. (2012). Prosociality: The contribution of traits,
values, and self-efficacy beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102, 1289–
1303.
Learning Objectives
1. Describe and evaluate Piaget’s theory of moral development including the premoral stage,
moral realism, immanent justice and moral absolutism, and moral reciprocity.
2. Describe and evaluate Kohlberg’s theory of moral development including the
preconventional, conventional, and postconventional levels of morality and associated stages.
3. Describe the revisions to Kohlberg’s theory including Gilligan’s perspective, the view that
moral reasoning varies in different situations, and the expansion to include the area of civil
rights and liberties.
4. Describe and evaluate Turiel’s social domain theory including the social conventional and
psychological domains.
5. Discuss the role of parents and teachers in children’s development of moral and social
conventional reasoning.
6. Describe the role of siblings and peers in children’s development of moral and conventional
reasoning.
7. Discuss the role of culture in children’s development of moral and conventional reasoning.
8. Discuss the development of self-regulation including the control phase, the self-control
phase, and the self-regulation phase.
9. Explain how delay of gratification is an indicator of self-regulation.
10. Describe what is known about individual differences in self-regulation.
11. Discuss whether children are consistent in their moral behavior over time and across
situations.
12. In discussing guilt as a moral emotion, explain the role of the child’s characteristics in
experiencing guilt as well as parents’ role in socializing the development of moral emotions.
13. Establish whether moral emotions matter for moral behavior.
14. Discuss what is meant by “the whole moral child.”
15. Define altruistic and prosocial behavior.
16. Discuss changes and stability in the development of prosocial behavior.
17. Describe Eisenberg’s model of prosocial reasoning including the hedonistic, needs-oriented,
approval seeking, empathic, transitional, and internalized levels.
18. Discuss gender differences in prosocial behavior.
19. Describe the biological, environmental, and cultural influences on prosocial behavior
development.
20. Discuss the role of empathy and perspective taking in prosocial behavior.
Student Handout 11-1
Chapter Summary

Three aspects of moral development are cognition, behavior, and emotion.
Moral Judgment
 Piaget and Kohlberg proposed theories of moral development involving stages through which
children progress as their cognitive capacities increase.
 In Piaget’s premoral stage, young children show little concern for rules. In the moral realism
stage, children judge rightness and wrongness based on immanent justice and objective
consequences and believe that rules are unchanging and unquestionable. In the moral
reciprocity stage, children recognize intentionality and the arbitrariness of social rules.
 Piaget underestimated children’s abilities: Young children can distinguish between intentions
and consequences if material is presented in a less complex manner than he used.
 In Kohlberg’s preconventional level of development, moral judgment is based on the desire
to avoid punishment (Stage 1) or gain rewards (Stage 2). At the conventional level, moral
judgment is based on conformity to obtain approval (Stage 3) or to comply with society’s
rules (Stage 4). At the postconventional level, moral judgment is based on society’s
consensus about human rights (Stage 5) or abstract principles of justice (Stage 6). Moral
judgment continues to develop in adulthood, but few individuals reach the postconventional
level.
 Kohlberg’s theory was criticized because it ignored the effects of cultural and historical
circumstances. The theory has been expanded to include interpersonal caring and civil rights.
 Turiel’s social domain theory suggested that moral reasoning is one of several domains of
social knowledge. Other domains include social conventions (e.g., knowledge about table
manners) and the psychological domain (personal preferences, prudential concerns, and
knowledge about self and others). Children learn quite early to distinguish among these
domains. They judge violations of moral rules as being worse than violations in other
domains because the former result in harm to another person and violate norms of justice and
fairness.
 Moral reasoning often involves multiple domains. Moral considerations generally take
priority over social-conventional and personal issues.
Moral Behavior
 Moral behavior is more likely to be related to moral judgment in older children and when the
person views the issue as moral rather than social conventional or personal.
 Self-regulation is the ability to inhibit impulses and behave in accord with social and moral
rules in the absence of external control.
 The development of self-regulation is fostered by a positive, responsive mother-child
relationship and a temperament characterized by active inhibition and effortful control.
 There is a high degree of consistency in children’s moral or immoral behavior across time
and situations. However, factors such as fear of detection, peer support for deviant behavior,
and the importance of the outcome for the child do influence children’s willingness to cheat,
lie, or steal.
Moral Emotions
 Emotions such as remorse, shame, and guilt are frequent responses to committed or
anticipated moral transgressions.
 Girls and children with fearful temperaments are more likely to experience moral emotions.
 Parents encourage children’s development of moral emotions by providing a warm and
supportive climate in the home and offering emotion-charged explanations when children
violate a rule.
 Moral emotions are related to moral behavior beginning at age 3 or 4.
 Cognitive, behavioral, and emotional aspects of moral development co-occur, interact, and
sometimes even conflict. Whether children define a dilemma as personal, conventional, or
moral (a cognitive process) influences how they act (behavior) and how they feel (emotion).
Prosocial and Altruistic Behavior
 Helping, sharing, and empathizing appear by the time children are 2. Altruistic behavior
appears later in development.
 Individual differences in styles of prosocial behavior are relatively stable over time.
 Children’s prosocial reasoning develops through a number of stages before it becomes based
on internalized values and norms.
 Girls tend to be kinder and more considerate than boys.
 Evidence of helping and sharing in infrahuman animals suggests that evolution has prepared
us for prosocial behavior. Genetic factors influence individual differences in prosocial
behavior.
 Parents, peers, television, pets, and culture all influence the likelihood of children’s acting
prosocially.
 Empathy and perspective taking contribute to children’s capacity for prosocial and altruistic
behavior.
Student Handout 11-2
Key Terms
GLOSSARY TERMS
altruistic behavior
Intrinsically motivated conduct intended to
help others without expectation of
acknowledgment or reward.
conscience
Internalized values and standards of moral
behavior.
conventional level
Kohlberg’s second phase of moral
development in which moral judgment is based
the motive to conform, either to get approval
from others or to follow society’s rules and
conventions.
delay of gratification
Putting off until a later time possessing or
doing something that gives one immediate
pleasure.
empathic reasoning
An advanced type of prosocial reasoning
involving sympathetic responding, selfreflective role taking, concern with the other’s
humanness, and guilt or positive affect related
to the consequences of one’s actions.
hedonistic reasoning
Making a decision to perform a prosocial act
on the basis of expected material reward.
immanent justice
The notion that any deviation from rules will
inevitably result in punishment or retribution.
internalize
The process by which children acquire the
rules and standards of behavior laid down by
others in their culture and adopt them as their
own.
internalized reasoning
The most advanced type of prosocial reasoning
in which justifications for helping are based on
the importance of maintaining societal
obligations or treating all people as equal.
moral absolutism
Rigid application of rules to all individuals
regardless of their culture or circumstance.
moral realism
Piaget’s second stage of moral development in
which children show great respect for rules and
apply them quite inflexibly.
moral reciprocity
Piaget’s third stage of moral development in
which children recognize that rules may be
questioned and altered, consider the feelings
and views of others, and believe in equal
justice for all.
needs-oriented reasoning
Prosocial judgments in which children express
concern for others’ needs although their own
needs may conflict with them.
postconventional level
Kohlberg’s third phase of moral development
in which judgments are controlled by an
internalized ethical code that is relatively
independent of the approval or disapproval of
others.
preconventional level
Kohlberg’s first phase of moral development in
which justification for behavior is based on the
desire to avoid punishment and gain rewards.
premoral stage
Piaget’s first phase of moral development in
which children show little concern for rules.
prosocial behavior
Conduct designed to help or benefit other
people.
prosocial reasoning
Thinking and making judgments about
prosocial issues.
psychological domain
An area of social judgment focused on beliefs
and knowledge of self and others.
self-regulation
The ability to use strategies and plans to
control one’s behavior in the absence of
external surveillance including inhibiting
inappropriate behavior and delaying
gratification.
An area of social judgment focused on social
expectations, norms, and regularities that help
facilitate smooth and efficient functioning in
society.
social conventional domain
The feeling of sorrow or concern for a
distressed or needy person.
sympathy
OTHER IMPORTANT TERMS IN THIS CHAPTER
adolescent legal competence
care dimension of morality
equalitarianism
inhibited/uninhibited temperament
interpersonal obligations
invariant stage sequence
kin selection
mirror neuron system
moral emotions
moral self
multi-domain issues
passive /active inhibition
perspective taking
prosocial segregation
psychological domain
self-regulation phases
Williams syndrome
Student Handout 11-3
A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors
thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently
discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the
drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of
the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but
he could only get together about $1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his
wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I
discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke
into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife.
Should Heinz have broken into the store to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?
Student Handout 11-4
Below are some of many examples of possible arguments that belong to Kohlberg’s six stages:
Stage one (obedience): Heinz should not steal the medicine because he will consequently be put
in prison which will mean he is a bad person. Or: Heinz should steal the medicine because it is
only worth $200 and not how much the druggist wanted for it; Heinz had even offered to pay for
it and was not stealing anything else.
Stage two (self-interest): Heinz should steal the medicine because he will be much happier if he
saves his wife, even if he will have to serve a prison sentence. Or: Heinz should not steal the
medicine because prison is an awful place, and he would more likely languish in a jail cell than
over his wife's death.
Stage three (conformity): Heinz should steal the medicine because his wife expects it; he wants
to be a good husband. Or: Heinz should not steal the drug because stealing is bad and he is not a
criminal; he has tried to do everything he can without breaking the law, you cannot blame him.
Stage four (law-and-order): Heinz should not steal the medicine because the law prohibits
stealing, making it illegal. Or: Heinz should steal the drug for his wife but also take the
prescribed punishment for the crime as well as paying the druggist what he is owed. Criminals
cannot just run around without regard for the law; actions have consequences.
Stage five (human rights): Heinz should steal the medicine because everyone has a right to
choose life, regardless of the law. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine because the scientist
has a right to fair compensation. Even if his wife is sick, it does not make his actions right.
Stage six (universal human ethics): Heinz should steal the medicine, because saving a human life
is a more fundamental value than the property rights of another person. Or: Heinz should not
steal the medicine, because others may need the medicine just as badly, and their lives are
equally significant.
Practice Exam Questions
Answers are given at the end of the questions. Pages in the text relating to each question are
given in parentheses () at the end of the question.
MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS
1. Piaget’s second phase of moral development in which children show great respect for rules and
apply them inflexibly is known as: (a) moral absolutism (b) moral realism (c) premoral stage
(d) preconventional moral stage (330)
2. Which of the following is a reason Piaget underestimated children’s moral capacities: (a) Piaget
only studied Swiss children (b) Piaget only studied his own children (c) Piaget only gave
children brief outlines of moral situations (d) Piaget acted out his situations instead of reading
them (331)
3. According to Kohlberg, the phase of moral development in which justification for behavior is
based on the desire to avoid punishment and gain rewards is: (a) postconventional (b) semiconventional (c) conventional (d) preconventional (331)
4. Of the children Kohlberg included in his longitudinal study, most attained which stage of moral
development? (a) authority and morality (b) morality of contract (c) obedience and punishment
(d) naïve hedonistic (333)
5. Which of the following is an accurate finding from the research testing Kohlberg’s levels of
moral development: (a) people in Taiwan and Israel explain their answers to moral dilemmas
by pointing to personal standards (b) people in India downplay in their reasoning the
maintenance of personal purity (c) people in different cultures go through the stages in the
same order (d) many people in other cultures skip a stage or regress to a lower stage (334)
6. The rightness or wrongness of addressing a teacher by his or her first name would be an
example from the: (a) moral domain (b) social conventional domain (c) personal choice domain
(d) psychological domain (337)
7. Children’s moral judgments are most effectively advanced if their parents: (a) use disciplinary
techniques that involve reasoning and explanation (b) express affection freely (c) avoid
harshness when disciplining (d) praise children for making moral decisions (339)
8. Which of the following was shown by research on children’s lying? (a) only about half of all
children lie (b) the rate of lying among children remains constant over time (c) there is no
observed gender difference in lying (d) 4-year-olds lie about once every 2 hours (345-346)
9. An advanced type of prosocial reasoning involving sympathetic responding, self-reflective role
taking, and guilt or positive affect related to the consequences of one’s actions is: (a) hedonistic
reasoning (b) empathic reasoning (c) needs-oriented reasoning (d) prosocial reasoning (353)
10. Gender differences in prosocial behavior are smallest when reported by: (a) peers (b) family
members (c) self-reports (d) observers (353)
11. Mothers are most successful at encouraging children to respond prosocially if they: (a) teach
them using angry explanations (b) teach them using physical restraint (c) point out a peer’s
distress in an affectively charged manner (d) all of the above (355)
ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. Describe four ways in which adolescents are not fully capable of standing trial. (349-350)
2. Discuss the current status of Kohlberg’s theory of moral development. (332-333)
3. Describe the links between moral judgment and moral behavior in childhood. (342-343)
Multiple choice answers: bcdacbadbdc