Gender and moral judgments: the role of who is speaking to whom

Abstract

This paper describes the significance of interpersonal context in the making of moral judgments. The study reveals the dynamics of moral development with regard to gender and age. The article draws on the social comparison orientation (Guimond et al. 2006) and questions Gilligan's (1977) structuralist position. The study focuses on the developmental aspect of morality in children aged between 7 and 12, and it specifies how gender identities are context and social role-specific and their impact on information processing. The study engaged some 240 children who finished incomplete narratives. The basic question concerned the process of solving implicit moral dilemmas and its possible dependence on care orientation (associated with femininity) or justice orientation (associated with masculinity). The analysis showed significant developmental changes with age: girls become more care-oriented but only towards opposite-sex peers, whereas boys become more justice-oriented but also only towards opposite-sex peers. The results of this study suggest, in accordance with Gilligan to some extent, that ‘care’ and ‘justice’ become naturalized ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ identities. However, in contrast to Gilligan's theory, we observe that these identities develop only in opposition to each other, are social context-specific, and coincide with gender role acceptance in the early teenage years. In other words, the study suggests that in the course of social comparisons, gender becomes an important catalyst for moral conduct.

Keywords::

• gender
• moral reasoning
• care orientation
• justice orientation
• Gilligan's theory
• Aesop's fable
• symmetric/asymmetric dyad

Acknowledgements

The interviews and recordings were conducted by the first author together with Piotr Fajer, MA at the University of Warsaw, as part of a research project (Grant BST 144 535 from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland) supervised by the second author. The text refers to the study ‘Child argumentation in solving moral dilemmas’, presented at the 11th International Pragmatics Conference, Melbourne, 2009. The authors wish to thank all of the children who participated in the study, and MA students Dorota Górecka, Janina Surowiec, and Magdalena Roszkowska for their help in analyzing the data. Grateful acknowledgment is due to Professor Grace Wales Shugar for her constructive comments on an earlier version of this text.

Notes

^1. After listening to Aesop's fable The Porcupine and the Moles, Polish children spoke of a hedgehog, not a porcupine (there is a similarity between the Polish names of the two animals).

^2. Sometimes the speakers did not propose any solution. This occurred in 5%–15% of cases in different groups of subjects. These cases were included in the frequency analyses, but for better clarity of the main results for the three coding categories (justice, care, and both) they are not presented in the figures provided with this text.

^3. This is shown by P < 0.027 in Fisher's exact test.

^4.P < 0.022 in Fisher's exact test.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Milanowicz

Anna Milanowicz holds Master's degrees both in Psychology and English studies (University of Warsaw). She works with Professor Barbara Bokus in the Department of Psycholinguistics in the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw. Professor Bokus was the supervisor of her Master's thesis on child argumentation in solving moral dilemmas. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation on children's ability to comprehend irony.

Barbara Bokus

Barbara Bokus is a humanities Professor and heads the Chair of Cognitive Psychology and the Department of Psycholinguistics of the Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Psychology of Language and Communication. She is the editor of many joint publications, including Studies in the Psychology of Child Language (2005), Studies in the Psychology of Language and Communication (2010), and The Humanities Today and the Idea of Interdisciplinary Studies (2011). Her field of research is developmental psycholinguistics, in which she focuses on issues of narrative discourse (narrative line and narrative field) and argumentative discourse (e.g. toward shared metaphoric meaning). She studies the impact of socio-situational factors on text construction by children and (most recently) responsibility for one's word on the example of pre-schoolers' understanding of promises.