Located in the thin of it: Young children’s use of thin moral concepts

Abstract

One important socio-cultural medium through which young children’s moral understanding is cultivated is parent/child discourse. Of particular interest to us was young children’s use of basic (‘thin’) evaluative concepts (good, bad, right and wrong), which are ubiquitous in everyday discourse and serve as a potential bridge from the non-moral to the moral domain. We investigated 14 2–5-year-old children’s (and their parents’) use of thin evaluative concepts and found that while they frequently used good and bad to morally evaluate other people’s and their own psychological/dispositional states and behaviors—as well as, less frequently, to highlight relevant standards, expectations and rules—they did not use right and wrong. In contrast, a sample of US written and spoken public conversation revealed that adults did. Reasons for this are discussed, along with the frequency of different types of moral evaluations, differences between children and their parents, and age-related trends.

Keywords:

• Moral concepts
• early moral development
• parent/child moral conversations

Notes

1. Interestingly, the use of good/bad for moral evaluation in a primate sample also appears to spike towards the end of the second year of life—the authors speculate this may be the result of the apes attempting to verify and negotiate the meaning and application of the concepts (Lyn, Franks, & Savage-Rumbaugh, 2008).

2. Also surely of relevance here is children’s developing appreciation for the importance of epistemic considerations (e.g., holding true/false beliefs) in their moral evaluations (see Chandler, Sokol, & Hallet, 2001; Chandler, Sokol, & Wainryb, 2000; Wainryb & Ford, 1998).