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How Does Moral Judgment Change From Early School Age To Later Adolescence?

Introduction

One of the first neuropsychological studies of moral judgment and decision making led Greene et al. (2004) to develop a Dual Process Theory to explain moral decision making. They highlight that man beings can exist driven by two distinct modes when they take to provide a behavioral response to an ecology stimulus. The first mode is automatic, based on emotions, reflexes, and intuition; the second is a deliberate mode, and information technology is useful when reasoned choices, and behaviors based on a specified and detailed knowledge of the surrounding situation are needed. The latter mode is conscious, based on specific rules and it requires more energy expenditure than the beginning manner. Brain imaging studies reported past Greene et al. (2004) have shown and confirmed that these 2 modes correspond to different neural activations. Specifically, automatic responses are produced by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) while controlled and conscious responses from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).

When discussing this Dual Procedure Theory of moral judgment, Greene et al. (2001) argued that characteristically deontological judgments (i.east., judgments applied to rights, duties, etc.) are supported past automated and emotional responses, while characteristically utilitarian judgments (which are based on toll-benefit reasoning) tend to exist supported by conscious response under the control of cognition (Greene, 2014).

According to some contempo literature showing the relevance of the rule-based thinking for moral judgments (Nichols et al., 2016; Ayars and Nichols, 2017), it is noteworthy to highlight that the processes involved in the deontological and utilitarian evaluations may be influenced by the organization of the noesis near rules in distinct domains. Within the theoretical framework of the Moral Domain Theory (Turiel, 1998) it has been hypothesized that the moral noesis is structured in separate domains, which are mainly related to the stardom between moral rules, aimed at preserving the other's well-being (east.g., the rules forbidding to striking or kill another person), and socio-conventional rules, aimed at guaranteeing the order of the social system (due east.chiliad., the school-based rule forbidding to call the teacher by their first name). There is some evidence that in people's evaluations, violations of moral rules are normally considered universally wrong, independently from the context in which they happened and independently from any statement that can be made by authorities. On the other side, violations of socio-conventional rules are judged as less serious and less punishable if compared to breaking moral rules, because the value of socio-conventional rules is perceived to depend on government' statements (Smetana and Braeges, 1990).

The Dual Process Theory was inspired by the "trolley problem," a moral dilemma widely used for the study of moral reasoning and decision making. The trolley problem describes a situation where a runaway trolley threatens to kill several persons if it proceeds on its present route. In the "switch" (impersonal) version of the trouble, a bystander tin can save those persons by flipping a switch that will deviate the trolley to an alternative track, where it volition kill one person instead of five. In the "footbridge" (personal) version of the dilemma, the bystander stands adjacent to a large stranger on a footbridge that spans the trolley track, and can stop the trolley by pushing the stranger off the bridge on the track below. When asked to confront the trolley trouble, most people agree that the decision of switching the trolley is acceptable (characteristically utilitarian judgment), but they evaluate pushing the stranger off the bridge as impermissible (characteristically deontological judgment), fifty-fifty if in both the situations the behavior intentionally causes the death of one person in order to save several people (Greene et al., 2001; Nichols and Mallon, 2006; Bartels, 2008). The switch problem and the footbridge problem are considered, respectively, prototypical examples of impersonal and personal dilemmas.

The tendency to accept moral rule violations more than hands when they are presented in impersonal rather than in personal contexts has been confirmed for all the versions of moral dilemmas that have been developed based on the trolley problem. Moreover, fMRI studies showed that brain areas related to emotions were more activated while examining personal (including the footbridge problem) than impersonal dilemmas (Greene et al., 2004). Neuroscientific studies have also provided plenty evidence that both adults and children tend to have harming the innocent victim much more when facing an impersonal state of affairs than a personal state of affairs (Greene et al., 2001; Pellizzoni et al., 2010; Greene, 2014). Nevertheless, the reason why personal and impersonal dilemmas elicit activation of unlike neural networks, and, even more than interestingly, elicit different rates of accepting moral violations is however unclear.

A first explanation has been based on the assumption that the core criterion causing this departure in moral evaluations consists in the presence (in personal dilemma contexts) or absence (in the impersonal dilemma contexts) of the application of a personal strength between the actor and their sacrificial victim (Greene et al., 2009). This explanation besides implies that the presence vs. absenteeism of the application of a personal force, mainly by means of a concrete contact, elicits a different sense of harm disfavor due to reduced empathic concern for the victim (e.g., Hauser et al., 2007; Patil and Silani, 2014). Post-obit this line of reasoning, the presence of the application of a personal forcefulness in the interaction betwixt the player and the victim may elicit empathic feelings in the person evaluating the action, considering the proximity will foster a personal identification with the histrion. This explanation, however, fails to explain some of the research results reported in other studies that used the original serial of dilemmas. These conflicting results lead to hypothesize that other criteria are mixed with the personal force criterion (Greene et al., 2001, 2009). In particular, the most relevant variable to play an upshot seems to be linked to the harm of the innocent person existence or non being the consequence of deflecting an existing threat onto a different political party. Therefore, at that place is nonetheless a need to examination the personal force benchmark in a rigorous and controlled way, in order to be able to analyze whether it tin can actually exist considered a master benchmark influencing moral evaluations. In order to do then, the experimental design should control all confounding variables, by the mode of having the presence or absence of a personal force applied by the amanuensis to the victim every bit the merely systematic variation distinguishing between personal and impersonal contexts of the moral violations. Furthermore, there is the need to examination the personal strength benchmark past ways of dilemmas that, in comparison to the trolley dilemma, describe situations closer to the everyday people'southward experience, and that, therefore, are more ecological.

A Model of the Possible Interplay of Moral Evaluation Criteria

Within the argue on moral judgment in the utilitarian framework of personal and impersonal situations, Nichols and Mallon (2006) proposed that iii factors play a role in evaluating the permissibility of moral rule violations: (1) cost/do good analysis, (two) checking for rule violations and prioritizing the dominion value, and (3) emotional activation. When deciding virtually acceptability of behaviors, people usually examine costs and benefits for each line of actions and check whether those deportment pause rules, in detail the moral rule that forbids to harm others. Apropos the tertiary factor, Nichols and Mallon (2006) hypothesized that the features of the context can arm-twist different levels of emotional activation that, in turn, influence the 2 cognitive processes of cost/do good analysis and evaluation of the moral dominion. Specifically, personal situations would arm-twist higher emotional activation in comparison to impersonal situations, because the awarding of personal force past the perpetrator would prompt empathizing with the victim. As a consequence, when personal situations are presented, the evaluation of the activity as respectful/transgressive of moral rules becomes a priority above the price-benefit analysis. On the other hand, when the perpetrator's activity is performed in absence of the awarding of a personal force (i.e., impersonal context), in the moral evaluations the consideration of how much the activeness is beneficial predominates on checking for moral rule violations. This model can help explaining why violations of moral rules can be judged as admissible under some context conditions, and it suggests that personal and impersonal dilemmas may provide a critical test of the relative relevance and weight of the processes involved in forming the decision to perform a social action (Nichols and Mallon, 2006). When facing personal dilemmas, we can expect that checking for rule violations is prompted by the presence of the application of a personal force that is typical of the perpetrator's action and, therefore, that this process will win over the cost/benefit analysis and lead to consider the action equally non-permissible. On the other paw, when presented with impersonal dilemmas, in which the application of a personal force in the perpetrator'south activity is absent, the process of analyzing the costs and benefits of the action becomes prominent and lead to evaluate harming others equally acceptable.

Developmental Differences in Moral Evaluations

Upwards to now, the enquiry within the framework of the Dual Process Theory has been focusing mainly on the assessments of moral violations in personal and impersonal dilemmas based on the trolley trouble presented higher up and using developed samples. More than research involving different age-groups and based on more than ecological situations is still needed.

To our knowledge, only few studies focused on children (Pellizzoni et al., 2010; Caravita et al., 2012; Powell et al., 2012; Cushman et al., 2013; Margoni and Surian, 2017). In 3 experiments focusing on preschoolers' evaluations of the trolley problem (Pellizzoni et al., 2010), virtually of three- to 5-twelvemonth old children judged every bit a right selection to injure one person in club to salvage five, simply only when information technology did not crave the agent to accept a physical contact with the victim (the switch version of the dilemma), thus resembling adults' answers. Accordingly, Powell et al. (2012) found that children aged 5–6 and 7–8 years, when facing situations that mirrored the personal and the impersonal dilemmas, produced evaluations similar to adults' ones.

Nevertheless, bold an developed model of moral reasoning as a universal model could potentially be misleading, and hence investigating meliorate possible changes in the weight of different criteria in determining moral evaluations has been recommended (Nichols and Mallon, 2006). In order to accomplish this goal, we demand (one) to farther explore possible historic period-related differences in the dual process moral reasoning by comparing different age-groups, and (2) to consider a greater number of personal and impersonal situations, which should be more than ecological.

When focusing on the dominion-based thinking, studies designed within the framework of the moral domain theory have investigated this process from a developmental perspective. Within this perspective, the research has provided prove that past the early age of 34 months children are able to distinguish between basic moral and socio-conventional events. By 42 months of historic period children are also able to judge a moral violation every bit more than serious and non-admissible than a socio-conventional violation, and they perceive the violation of the moral as incorrect independently of regime' statements and rule contingency (Smetana and Braeges, 1990). Starting at the age of 3 years, children are also aware of the consequences of actions, and they gauge behaviors that break moral rules equally wrong because intrinsically unfair (Helwig et al., 2001).

Within this line of research, most of the existing studies have focused on preschoolers. Withal, the fiddling enquiry involving older samples of children and early adolescents has provided testify that the ability of distinguishing between domains continues to increase by age (Glassman and Zan, 1995). Younger children have been found to consider moral rules as dependent on say-so's statements (thus, as socio-conventional) at a larger extent than older children do (Caravita et al., 2009; Gasser and Keller, 2009), and, when evaluating a behavior in situations of mixed domains, preschoolers and outset graders tend to evaluate these behavior equally socio-conventional more than than third graders practise (Crane and Tisak, 1995).

Age-related changes within the full general domain structure, however, need to exist farther explored past because a larger range of situations. Indeed, most of the existing studies focused on events where the target transgressive action involved only physical harm (Smetana, 2006) and studies on the moral domain distinction during late-childhood (8–9 years) and adolescence, that is, the age periods that are traditionally causeless as critical for the development of rule socio-conventionality (Kohlberg, 1981; for a review, Killen and Smetana, 2006), are scarce.

The Nowadays Study

The first goal of this study is exploring how children and adolescents, when engaged in moral reasoning, use the criteria of moral judgment that the Dual Process Theory individuates every bit relevant for the moral evaluations. We mainly focused on the contribution of rule-based thinking, as conceptualized in the framework of the moral domain theory, toward reasoning about moral dilemmas. For this purpose, we referred to the model proposed by Nichols and Mallon (2006). This model provides a possible interpretative hypothesis of how the contextual dimension of the presence/absence of a personal strength applied by the agent in harming the victim may influence the evaluation of the acceptability of moral rules violations within an utilitarian framework. We hypothesize that the evaluation of moral rule violations as acceptable is more strongly associated to accepting to harm a person in guild to benefit others in impersonal than in personal situations. This derives from the assumption that when personal situations are presented, the application of a personal strength by the agent in harming the victim prioritizes the respect of moral rules (forbidding to impairment others) over the cost/benefit assay. In contrast, in impersonal situations, where at that place is no application of personal strength by the agent, the price-benefit analysis often prevails over the respect of moral rules, and the moral rule violation is more easily accepted.

The 2d purpose of the study is exploring age-related differences in how children and adolescents integrate the moral evaluation criteria that were individuated past the Dual Procedure Theory and by the moral domain theory (adopted equally theoretical model of how the dominion-based thinking is organized). This would foster a better understanding of how different criteria of evaluation interact, and affect moral decision making at dissimilar ages, inside the normative population. This data may foster a meliorate understanding of how moral reasoning develops, and assistance to ameliorate identify possible impairments in non-normative groups. To achieve this goal, we compared three age levels that are considered to be critical for the development of rule agreement and moral reasoning (Killen and Smetana, 2006): a sample of 8–ix yr children to 12–13 years early-adolescents and to 15–16 years adolescents. As far as moral reasoning in personal/impersonal contexts is concerned, we hypothesize that all 3 age groups will accept moral violations more hands in impersonal rather than personal situations, reflecting a universal trend. Assuming a developmental perspective, a job coherent with the domain theory (Loureno, 2014) would take been the most advisable to utilize. To achieve this goal, an ecologically valid bombardment of moral dilemmas, suitable for the target population, was developed.

Because this is the first study assuming that the rule-based thinking is organized in unlike domains and exploring how this form of thinking works in clan with the toll-do good analysis in different age-groups, we tin can just formulate preliminary hypotheses about age-related differences in the associations between evaluation criteria in judging violations of moral vs. socio-conventional rules, and violations of the moral rules in personal vs. impersonal contexts. We hypothesize that the integration between evaluations of violations of both moral and socio-conventional rules and of moral rule violations in personal and impersonal contexts increases by age, because of the development of cognitive processes.

Methods

Participants

The study involved 226 students attending two primary schools, two centre schools, and two high schools in the areas of Milan and Brescia, two of the largest cities in Northern Italian republic. At the time of the data collection, 81 participants were in fourth grade (primary school group: 59.3% boys; K = viii.98 years; SD = 0.39), 72 were in seventh form (middle school group: 55.6%% boys; M = 12.14 years; SD = 0.61), and 73 were in 10th class (high schoolhouse group: 52.1%% boys; M = 15.10 years; SD = 0.38). Most (81.ix %) participants were born in Italy and of Italian lineage.

Information on the SES of participants' families was nerveless by asking participants to report their parents or legal caregivers' qualifications and jobs. Only 2 participants (0.ix%) were non able to provide this information. Twenty-one percent resulted of low-middle SES, 56.3% of middle SES, and 22.eight% of heart-high SES.

Measures

Moral vs. Socio-Conventional Domains

A specific measure was used to evaluate domain attribution to rules and acceptance of social violations based on distinguishing between moral and socio-conventional domains. The assessment tool (Caravita et al., 2012) was equanimous by 21 items, consisting in short stories where a moral schoolhouse dominion was cleaved, and 20 items in which a socio-conventional school rule was violated. All the items required the respondent to assume the perspective of the character breaking the rule. In half of the scenarios characters were girls and in half boys. Two versions of the measure were created: ane for children and one for early-adolescents and adolescents. The two versions were equivalent for the content, the word number, and the grammar structure of the items. They differed only for contextual factors, which were related to primary school in the children version and to secondary school in the boyish version (in the Italian school system heart and high school share the same primary contextual characteristics). Afterwards each item was presented, the respondent was asked to judge whether the main character'south behavior in that situation was correct (acceptability of rule violations). Samples items are displayed in Table 1.

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Tabular array 1. Examples of moral and socio-conventional scenarios.

For both moral and socio-conventional scenarios, the total score of the acceptability of dominion violation is computed as the sum of the particular scores. Reliability of scores (Cronbach's alpha) was from adequate to good for the children version (moral rule scenarios 0.67; socio-conventional rule scenarios 0.83) and adept for the adolescent version (moral dominion scenarios 0.91; socio-conventional rule scenarios 0.90).

Personal vs. Impersonal Moral Dilemmas

Eight couples of impersonal and personal dilemmas, that is, 16 dilemmas altogether, to be administered to master school children, and a corresponding series of dilemmas to be administered to elder students were used (Caravita et al., 2012). The characters acting in the dilemmas were all children, girls in half of the dilemmas and boys in the 2nd half. Each dilemma presented a scenario where a "bride," in lodge to produce a do good to another child, has to deed so that a impairment, a loss, or a disadvantage affects a tertiary kid (henceforth the "victimized child"). For each of the eight scenarios in that location was an impersonal and a personal version. Existence the contextual information the same, in impersonal scenarios there was no physical contact betwixt the helpmate and the victimized child, that is, the helpmate did not interact face to confront with the victim; In personal scenarios the helpmate touched, looked at, and/or spoke to the victimized child. Presence/absence of physical contact between the helpmate and the victimized child was the unique, unequivocal benchmark that distinguished between the personal and the impersonal dilemma versions and possible confounding variables were discarded (Antonietti, 2011).

Focusing on formal features, dilemmas consisted of short stories, easy to exist understood, not involving the knowledge of specific social norms, not describing dramatic and emotionally impressive situations. The victimized kid was ever unaware of the situation (otherwise she/he might make up one's mind to sacrifice her-/himself) and could not avoid existence involved in the action carried out past the bride. The helpmate could not sacrifice her-/himself instead of the victimized kid. The action performed by the helpmate always had a certain outcome. The helpmate took no direct advantage or harm equally a consequence of her/his action.

2 series of dilemmas were prepared for children (i.due east., the primary school students) and for adolescents. The two series but differed from each other for state of affairs details, which matched what normally occurs in everyday-life school experiences of, respectively, children and elder youths. Examples of pairs of dilemmas are displayed in Table 2.

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Tabular array ii. Examples of personal and impersonal scenarios.

Each dilemma ended with the question: "Is information technology right to do and so?" (Yes = 1; No = 0). Total scores of personal and impersonal dilemmas were the sum of dilemma responses, with higher scores respective to accepting pain the victimized child. Reliability (Cronbach'due south alpha) of the sub-series of dilemmas was acceptable in both the versions, but improve for the adolescent version (personal dilemmas 0.70; impersonal dilemmas 0.72) than for the children version (personal dilemmas 0.55; impersonal dilemmas 0.50).

Procedure

A broader report was carried out in collaboration with the rehabilitation eye IRCCS "Eugenio Medea" (Bosisio Parini, Italia), in order to include atypically developing participants. The ethical committee of the IRCCS "Eugenio Medea" approved the whole research project, including the electric current study, which but involved typically developing participants. Written informed consent for all participants was collected in accord with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Personal and impersonal dilemmas were mixed and so divided into two sequences so that the personal and impersonal versions of the same dilemma were not included in the same sequence. The moral and socio-conventional scenarios were mixed as well so organized in two sequences. The four sequences were then alternated and their club was reversed, thus obtaining two administration protocols. Protocol 1 started with one of the two sequences of moral and socio-conventional stories, whereas in protocol 2 the starting sequence was ane of the ii dilemma sequences. In each school-level half of the classes answered the protocol one and the other half the protocol 2.

Measures were group-administered in participants' classrooms during normal school time in a unmarried session (approximately 90 min). A enquiry banana supervised the administration, gave information nearly filling out the measures, answered participants' questions, and in primary school classes read aloud each item of the measures, giving the children enough fourth dimension to answer. Class participation was authorized by principals and committees of teachers. Participants' parents (or legal guardians) were informed of the study aims and procedure by ways of a letter that was sent by the schools. Parents actively consented the children'south participation by signing the consent form attached to the letter. At the showtime of the session, participants were informed about the aims of the research projection and their correct to withdraw from the study at any time, and were asked for a verbal consent to their participation. Only 5 students (2.19% of the sample) were not immune to participate in the written report.

Results

Associations of Moral Components

Correlations (Pearson's r) of the moral evaluation criteria for the overall sample are reported in Table iii.

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Table 3. Overall sample: Correlations of moral evaluation criteria (acceptability of the rule violations).

Accepting the moral rule violation in personal and impersonal contexts was positively associated with judging rule violations as acceptable for both moral and socio-conventional rules. Correlations in the split up historic period groups are reported in Tabular array 4.

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Tabular array four. Correlations of moral evaluation criteria (acceptability of the rule violations) in the separate age-groups.

Amongst children the levels of acceptability of violations of moral and socio-conventional rules were highly positively associated to each other. The same was true for accepting the moral rule violations in personal and impersonal contexts. Nonetheless, the acceptance of harming a person in both personal and impersonal contexts was continued to the acceptance of violations of socio-conventional rules merely not of moral rules.

Among early adolescents, accepting rule violations in both the domains was positively correlated with accepting to harm others in impersonal and personal contexts, but the correlation was stronger for the impersonal than the personal dilemmas. These differences in the forcefulness of the correlation indices were pregnant at the Steiger'south z test: correlations of accepting breaking moral rules with personal/impersonal scenarios, z = −2.906, p < 0.01; correlations of accepting breaking socio-conventional rules with personal/impersonal scenarios, z = −ii.115, p < 0.05. Also, amidst adolescents, accepting violation of both moral and socio-conventional rules was more strongly associated with accepting to impairment others in impersonal than in personal contexts, but these differences in the force of the associations were not significant at the Steiger'south z-test (moral rules: z = −1.365, ns; socio-conventional rules: z = −0.394, ns).

Age-Related Trends of Moral Evaluation Criteria

In order to investigate age-related trends, data were first analyzed by performing repeated-measure Analyses of Variance (ANOVA) by assuming scores in the series of moral vs. socio-conventional rule scenarios and personal vs. impersonal dilemmas as dependent variables, blazon of the rule/context equally within-subject area factor, and age-grouping and gender equally between-subject independent variables. 2 carve up ANOVAs (Tables 5, six) were, therefore, carried out: one for acceptability of violations of moral and socio-conventional rules and one for personal/impersonal contexts.

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Table v. Ways, standard deviations of moral and socio-conventional rule scenarios, and indexes of the ANOVAs tests.

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Table 6. Means, standard deviations of the personal and impersonal scenarios, and indexes of the ANOVAs tests.

Concerning the acceptability of rule violations in moral vs. socio-conventional scenarios, primary effects of gender, type of rule, age-group, and the interaction effect of blazon of rule X historic period-group emerged. Girls evaluated rules as less breakable than boys. Acceptance of rule violations increased past age. Violations of rules were evaluated equally less adequate for moral rules than socio-conventional rules by all participants. However, the deviation in scores between moral and socio-conventional rules gradually increased across age-groups (Figure i). Univariate ANOVAs performed in guild to improve investigate the interaction result of type of rule X age-group showed that scores for accepting the dominion violations were lower for the moral rules than for the socio-conventional rules in all the three age-groups [Children: F (1, 79) = 27.71, p < 0.001, ηii = 0.26; Early on adolescents: F (i, 71) = 33.98, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.32; Adolescents: F (1, 72) = 83.94, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.54]. The three age-groups differed from each other in reference to both moral [F (2, 222) = 10.75, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.09] and socio-conventional rules [F (2, 222) = 25.78, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.19]. Yet, at the Student-Newmann-Keuls post hoc test, the scores of the 3 age-groups were all significantly different from each other for the socio-conventional rule violations, just non for the moral rule violations. Concerning the moral rule violations, but the subsample of children scored significantly lower than early adolescents and adolescents.

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Figure 1. Mean scores of the 3 age-groups for acceptability of moral and socio-conventional rule violations.

When considering personal vs. impersonal contexts, the master consequence of the type of context was statistically pregnant, with lower scores for personal equally compared to impersonal dilemmas. Gender besides had a significant main issue, with girls scoring lower than boys. No pregnant effects by the age group emerged.

Effects of the Context on Accepting Moral Rule Violations

We referred to the Nichols and Mallon's Model by investigating the hypothesis that the evaluation of moral rules as non-breakable is less influential on accepting the harming actions in impersonal contexts than in personal contexts. This would happen because perceiving moral rule as non-brittle is hypothesized to be less prioritized on the price-do good assay in impersonal situations than in personal situations (Nichols and Mallon, 2006). This means that accepting the violations of moral rules should exist more strongly associated with harming some other person in impersonal than in personal contexts.

To test this hypothesis, we performed a repeated measure Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) with scores of personal vs. impersonal dilemmas as a within-subject factor. The acceptability of violations of moral rules was specified equally a covariate. The expectation was to find a significant interaction effect of the type of dilemma by the acceptability of the moral rule violations. According with our hypothesis, the acceptability of the moral rule violation non only affected scores through the dilemmas [F (one, 209) = 47.28, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.eighteen], just too its interaction effect past the type of dilemma was pregnant [F (1, 209) = 15.28, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.07]. To amend examine the interaction effect, follow-up regressions were performed: Scores of personal and impersonal dilemmas were specified as the criterion variables and the acceptability of the moral rule violations every bit the predictor variable.

Every bit hypothesized, the acceptability of the moral rule violations explained a significant portion of variance of scores of both personal [R 2 = 0.10, F (one, 215) = 24.57, p < 0.001] and impersonal dilemmas [R 2 = 0.22, F (ane, 215) = lx.74, p < 0.001], but its association with the dilemmas score was stronger for the impersonal [β = 0.47, p < 0.001] than for the personal contexts [β = 0.32, p < 0.001].

In lodge to explore whether this interplay of the variables changes by historic period, the ANCOVA test was carried out separately inside each age-group. Among children, both the chief outcome of the acceptability of violations of moral rules and its interaction effect past the type of context were not meaning [respectively: F (one, 73) = 2.43, ns; F (ane, 73) = 0.09, ns]. Among both early adolescents and adolescents, the primary consequence of the acceptability of moral rule violation was significant [Early on adolescents: F (one, 64) = x.96, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.15; Adolescents: F (ane, 68) = xl.50, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.37], and the interaction effect of blazon of context X acceptability of moral rule violation every bit well [Early adolescents: F (one, 64) = 21.09, p < 0.001, ηtwo = 0.25; Adolescents: F (1, 68) = 4.18, p < 0.05, η2 = 0.06]. The follow-upwards regressions confirmed that in both the age-groups the acceptability of the moral rule violations was associated with accepting to impairment a person more strongly in impersonal [Early adolescents: R 2 = 0.25, F (1, 65) = 22.16, p < 0.001, β = 0.fifty p < 0.05; Adolescents: R 2 = 0.35, F (1, 68) = 37.39, p < 0.001, β = 0.59 p < 0.001] than in personal dilemmas [Early adolescents: R 2 = 0.08, F (one, 65) = 5.56, p < 0.05, β = 0.27 p < 0.05; Adolescents: R 2 = 0.25, F (1, 68) = 17.ninety, p < 0.001, β = 0.46 p < 0.001].

As a further test of Nichols and Mallon'south Model, we besides performed an ANCOVA with scores of personal vs. impersonal dilemmas as a within-subject cistron and the acceptability of violations of socio-conventional rules as a covariate. Since personal and impersonal dilemmas describe mainly situations in which moral rather than socio-conventional rules are broken, we can expect that the interaction effect of accepting socio-conventional rule violations with personal vs. impersonal contexts is lower, equally compared to the interaction effect of accepting moral rule violations, or non-significant. We tested the ANCOVA separately for the three age groups, since the age level already showed to buffer these effects in the previous analyses. Amongst children and adolescents the interaction result of the acceptability of socio-conventional dominion violations with type of the dilemma was non-significant [children: F (1, 73) = 0.05, ns; adolescents: F (1, 68) = 1.12, ns]. Among early adolescents the interaction outcome of acceptability of socio-conventional rule violations with type of the context was meaning [F (one, 64) = eight.91, p < 0.01, η2 = 0.12], even if lower than the interaction effect of accepting moral dominion violation in the same age group. As well acceptability of moral rule violations, in follow-upwards regression the acceptability of socio-conventional dominion violations was associated more strongly with harming the victimized kid in impersonal contexts [R 2 = 0.15, F (ane, 65) = 28.41, p < 0.001, β = 0.55 p < 0.001] than in personal contexts [R ii = 0.30, F (1, 69) = 12.12, p = 0.001, β = 0.39 p = 0.001].

Word and Conclusions

The starting time goal of this study was exploring the possible coaction of criteria of moral evaluations reflecting the organization of moral cognition in domains related to types of rules, and the evaluations of moral violations in personal and impersonal contexts as proposed in the Dual Process Theory (Greene et al., 2004). Nosotros assumed the model proposed past Nichols and Mallon (2006) as a possible interpretative hypothesis to understand this interplay. Our 2nd goal was exploring whether the associations of moral evaluation criteria and their interplay in judgments change by age. Possible moderation by age was examined by considering iii separate age groups: children, early on adolescents, and adolescents.

As far as the first goal is concerned, correlation indexes showed that judging rule violations as adequate was associated to evaluating harming some other person equally possible in guild to help a 3rd one. This association was stronger for impersonal than personal contexts. The outcome was pregnant for the all sample, even if it was more distinctive for the two adolescents groups. These data provide a first confirmation of the potential relevance of context characteristics in prioritizing the check of coherence between evaluations of the behavior and the respect of moral rules over the analysis of costs and benefits per se (the model by Nichols and Mallon, 2006). The tendency to permit moral rule violations was associated to accepting the harm of others, if this provides a possible benefit. This association was weaker in the personal contexts, which were characterized past the presence of a personal force applied past the agent in harming the victim, than in the impersonal contexts. Furthermore, the tendency to allow violations of socio-conventional rules had either non-significant or, in comparing to the acceptability of moral dominion violations, weaker interaction consequence with the presence/absence of the awarding of personal force by the agents. This result provides some evidence that it is the judgment about moral rules, simply not the judgment nearly socio-conventional rules, that, in moral evaluations, is influenced past these context characteristics, and, hence, it supports the relevance of the dominion-based thinking for moral judgements. Therefore, Nichols and Mallon's model that focuses on how different judgment criteria, related to context dimensions and types of rules, interact in influencing the moral evaluations, seems to provide an acceptable perspective to better understand how unlike moral criteria play a office in the moral decision making. This may subsequently foster a clearer agreement of the organization of moral cognition and reasoning.

An interesting and possibly controversial finding is the positive correlation that emerged between violation of socio-conventional rules and permissibility of harm in impersonal and personal moral dilemmas. Information technology is easy to see that disregard for moral rules can lead to acceptance of harm for the greater good, only information technology is less clear why condone for conventional rules is associated with utilitarian moral judgments. What all of these judgments share is the common conclusion of norm violation. So someone could debate that what our results runway using moral domain chore is the propensity to bide by norms and this is what is actually predictive of norm violation in a different context. Some evidence from literature may assistance explaining this specific result. Huebner et al. (2009), exploring the role of emotions in moral evaluations, hypothesize that a fast, unconscious process that operates over causal-intentional representations mediates our moral judgments. Such a fast and unconscious mechanism would clearly explain our results, since information technology would elicit an reply earlier the distinction between moral and socio-conventional rules has been fully processed at a cognitive level, pertaining the reading of it to the moral domain and not to a general response to norms.

Historic period-Related Trends in Moral Evaluations

The distinction between moral domains has been found to increase with historic period. Coherently with our hypotheses, the understanding of socio-conventional rules as more than breakable than moral rules was college among early on adolescents than children, and amid adolescents than amongst younger age groups. Overall, the picture emerging from our information is in line with the traditional view of a gradual improvement, across adolescent years, of the comprehension of the nature of rules and of socio-conventional rules as child-bearing and based on the social understanding (e.g., Kohlberg, 1981). Appropriately, adolescents become progressively more able to understand the nature of the rules and tend to evaluate the rule violations as more than acceptable for the socio-conventional rules than for the moral rules. Even so, surprisingly, primary school children judged moral rules as significantly less breakable than older youngsters. The expectation would have been that the age-level was not influential on the judgment of moral dominion violations as not acceptable. Nevertheless, it should be noted that the size of these two effects was low (0.09 and 0.02) and that this consequence may reverberate a view of rules, independent of the blazon, which is overall more rigid for children than for adolescents. In accordance with this interpretation, children showed the everyman differences in accepting moral and socio-conventional rule violations and revealed a less undifferentiated comprehension of norms.

As we hypothesized, and consistent with previous literature involving other age samples (Pellizzoni et al., 2010), comparison the personal and the impersonal dilemmas, children and adolescents showed the aforementioned tendency, already institute in adults, to consider harming some other person equally acceptable more hands in contexts where the agent'due south awarding of personal force in harming the victim is absent-minded than in contexts entailing this personal forcefulness. Information technology is important to highlight that this tendency emerged in this report using scenarios that were more than ecological than the original trolley trouble. The apparent universality of this behavior gives some support to theories assuming the beingness of an innate moral sense (Sachdeva et al., 2011), or, at to the lowest degree, an innate set of parameters for building morality (Hauser, 2006). Assuming that personal contexts are associated to higher activation of emotion-related brain areas than the impersonal contexts are (Greene et al., 2001), nosotros can hypothesize that emotions may be one of the innate tools for moral intuitions and judgments (Haidt, 2001). This is coherent with the idea that the early on distinction between moral and socio-conventional domains is grounded in empathy (Helwig, 2008). Empathic emotions may establish the value of moral rules and the emotional activation elicited past the application of personal force by the harm perpetrator may make the concordance between action and moral rules a priority (Nichols and Mallon, 2006).

When exploring possible age-related differences in the coaction of criteria influencing moral evaluations, the correlation indexes showed that the associations between accepting violations across the four situations increased with historic period. This outcome suggests an increase of coherence in moral judgment with age, probably reflecting the development of cerebral skills linked to moral reasoning that leads to a more than integrated performance. Accordingly, nosotros establish support for Nichols and Mallon's model amidst early on adolescents and adolescents, that is, the two age groups that were expected to evidence the strongest integration in moral reasoning, just not amid children. Similarly, Powell et al. (2012) institute that children (5–half-dozen years old) integrated less the cost/benefit assay in their justifications for assuasive harming a person in order to save v than older children (aged 7–8 years) did. We tin hence presume that the ability to consider more evaluation criteria in moral situations is likely to increase and to show higher levels of integration with age. These findings and the outcomes on age-related differences for the domain structure emerging from the exam of correlations and ANCOVAs highlight the demand to further investigate the relations among different evaluation criteria in moral conclusion making, and the underlying structure of morality. These criteria potentially influence the moral reasoning to a dissimilar extent across different historic period groups. This interpretation agrees with the literature suggesting that at unlike ages young people attribute different weights to specific dimensions (such every bit agent's intention and the respect of the rule) when producing moral evaluations (Helwig et al., 2001), and supports the relevance of exploring how these criteria, studied in different traditions of inquiry, interact and modify their interplay according to the child's development. This investigation tin can provide a better understanding of how moral reasoning changes within the normative population past age, and, afterwards, can provide relevant reference points to evaluate moral reasoning skills and development in non-normative groups of different age.

Limitations and Futurity Directions

There are some limitations in this study. Beginning, the nerveless information were just cantankerous-sectional. Therefore, nosotros could investigate developmental differences in the organization of moral reasoning just by comparison dissimilar historic period groups. Furthermore, we did not explore the role of emotions in influencing moral reasoning. Hence, nosotros could only hypothesize that differences in emotional activation and emotional response tin can exist too influential on the unlike weight attributed to different moral evaluation criteria, which are related to specific context characteristics. Time to come studies can farther investigate the possible function played by cultural differences. Literature on this specific topic offers mixed results (Tang and Tang, 2016). On one hand, some class of a "generalized ethic," only marginally influenced past culture, has been reported. For instance, Isle of mann et al. (2016) showed that dishonesty is limited in magnitude and like across countries and information technology is non associated to cultural values. Moreover, Kwan (2016) observed that both American and Chinese participants disapproved the infringement of intellectual property rights to a similar extent and expressed the aforementioned level of anger in response to to such a violation. On the other mitt, by contrast, cultural factors, every bit argued by Graham et al. (2016) in their review of the literature, appear to influence moral judgments and moral behaviors, since differences in morality occur not only across societies, but also within the aforementioned national context, when comparing inter-societal subgroups. Sychev et al. (2016) found that, co-ordinate to self-written report measures of morality, Mongolian and Russian adolescents share bourgeois moral foundations, whereas German adolescents exhibit more progressive moral foundations.

With specific reference to moral dilemmas, Arutyunova et al. (2016) proposed tasks like to the trolley problem, both involving and not involving personal contacts, via Web to a large sample of North American and British people in comparison to Russian participants. They plant cultural differences merely in the male subsample, with men from Western cultures resulting more than utilitarian than Russian men. Focusing on children, Michelin et al. (2010), past using a version of the trolley problems that was adjusted for children, reported that in a sample of Italian mono-lingual children the preference for an commonsensical criterion (namely, saving more persons) did non emerge until the age of 6 years. Instead, 4 and 5-twelvemonth children with a Slovenian-Italian linguistic and cultural background applied such a criterion even in the personal condition. The distinct effect of civilization and language should be disentangled, as stressed past the study conducted by Chan et al. (2016), where participants made more utilitarian choices in the Footbridge dilemma when it was presented in a foreign language than in their native language.

Every bit farther limitation, the electric current study simply focused on hypothetical judgments. Notwithstanding, the actual behavioral responses may change in more realistic contexts, as institute in some previuos studies (Patil et al., 2014; Francis et al., 2016). Lastly, reliability of the series of personal and impersonal dilemmas was adequate but just moderate among children.

Notwithstanding these limitations, there are several novelties in this study. This is one of the first studies exploring the relations betwixt dissimilar moral evaluation criteria, and the related arrangement of moral noesis in domains and of moral reasoning factors related to specific contextual facets. Moreover, this study is ane of the first attempts to join lines of research on moral reasoning that are ordinarily split in other studies. The value of linking different study traditions has been highlighted as a futurity promising management of inquiry (Killen and Smetana, 2008). From the same perspective, we need further research projects exploring from a developmental perspective the interplay of different moral criteria, emotions, and knowledge in determining moral evaluations, and the actual moral behavior in the normative population, in social club to be able to gain a improve understanding of possible impairments and deficits in moral reasoning of non-normative groups, such equally children or adolescents with traumatic encephalon injury (Beauchamp et al., 2013).

As a tertiary novelty of this report, this research projection is i of the few studies testing the universality of the distinction between moral judgements for personal and impersonal contexts in non-adult groups and, to our knowledge, this is the first study performing this examination using three carve up age groups: children, early on adolescents, and adolescents.

Every bit a final strength of this study, nosotros used ecological scenarios to test differences between personal and impersonal contexts, and assessed moral domain features using a large selection of scenarios. This research arroyo tin exist promising for improving our understanding of the architecture of morality and of its development with age.

Ethics Argument

This study was carried out in accordance with the recommendations of American Psychology Association, and Associazione Italiana di Psicologia. Written informed consent was collected from parents/legal guardians of all participants, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants gave as well oral informed consent. The protocol was canonical by the upstanding committee of the IRCCS "Eugenio Medea" (Bosisio Parini, Italy).

Author Contributions

SC contributed substantially to the conception of the study, the development of the measures, the data collection, the data analyses and the interpretation of the results, and to drafting the article. She also leaded the writing process of the article. LD contributed substantially to the development of the measures, and the information drove. She also contributed to the first typhoon of the article. VP contributed essentially to the information analyses and the interpretation of the results, and to writing the article. BC contributed essentially to the information analyses and the interpretation of the results, and to writing the article. AA contributed substantially to the formulation of the written report, the development of the measures, the data collection, the information analyses and the estimation of the results, and to writing the article. He leads the research of the group on this topic.

Funding

The publication of the present newspaper was supported by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, Italy, thanks to a grant delivered within the research funding line D3.one.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of whatsoever commercial or financial relationships that could exist construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00597/full

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