Children's Moral Reasoning About Their Own Spontaneous Prosocial ...

Developmental Psychology 1979, Vol. 15, No. 2, 228-229

Children's Moral Reasoning About Their Own Spontaneous Prosocial Behavior Nancy Eisenberg-Berg and Cynthia Neal Arizona State University Twenty-two 48-63 month-old preschoolers were observed and questioned by a familiar experimenter about their spontaneous helping, sharing, or comforting behaviors over a 12-week period. The children justified their prosocial behaviors primarily with references to others' needs and pragmatic considerations. The children used little punishment and authority-oriented, stereotyped, approval-oriented, or hedonistic reasoning. There were no sex or age differences in the children's moral reasoning. In his classic book on moral judgment, Piaget ing, comforting, or helping (i.e., instances of (1932) noted that children's reasoning about prosocial behavior that were not prompted by real-life moral dilemmas seemed to be more ad- an adult). When the experimenter did observe vanced than their moral judgments about hypo- a prosocial act, she tried to elicit the prosocial thetical moral dilemmas. Piaget's discussion of child's reasoning about the behavior with questhis issue suggested that this discrepancy might tions such as, "Why did you do that?" or "How be due to either one of two factors: (a) the tend- come you gave that to John?" If the child's reency for verbal thought to lag behind concrete, sponse was vague or incomprehensible, the action-related knowledge; or (b) the pervasive experimenter attempted to question the child egocentrism of the young child, which makes further, although such attempts were not althe task of attending to internal psychological ways successful. states (e.g., intentions) underlying another's During the 12-week period, 22 of the 26 chilbehavior more difficult than experiencing one's dren (14 males and 8 females) initiated 65 inciown internal (motivational) states. Few re- dents of prosocial behavior (range = 0-9 besearchers, however, have examined children's haviors; median number of acts per child was moral judgments about their own real-life, between 2 and 3). The children generally used active behaviors, and those researchers (e.g., a variety of types of reasoning if they initiated Damon, 1977; Ugurel-Semin, 1952) who have several prosocial acts. examined children's moral judgments have The reasoning elicited in each of the 65 incidone so in structured, contrived situations. dents (80 different reasons in all) was coded Naturalistic research examining children's by two persons into the following categories: reasoning about their own self-instigated, spon- (a) authority /punishment orientation (refertaneous, prosocial behavior is needed. The pres- ences to demands of authorities and/or punishent study was designed for this purpose. ment, i.e., an aspect of Kohlberg's Stage 1, The subjects were 25 white, 1 Asian-Ameri- 1969), (b) hedonistic orientation (child justifies can, middle-class children (16 males and 10 behavior with references to an expected selfish females) 48-63 months of age. These chil- gain), (c) orientation to mutual gain (child dren were observed and questioned in their justifies behavior with references to resultant preschool classes by a familiar female adult gain for both the self and the recipient of aid), experimenter for approximately 4 hours per (d) affectional relationship orientation (child week over a 12-week period. The experimenter justifies behavior with references to the relationmoved around the classroom and playground ship between the child him/herself and the recipand watched for spontaneous incidents of shar- ient of aid), (e) approval and interpersonal orientation (child assists/shares with another to obtain social approval and/or to enhance interThe research reported in this article was supported by a grant-in-aid to the first author from Arizona personal interactions), (f) stereotyped good/bad orientation (child justifies behavior with stereoState University. Requests for reprints should be sent to Nancy typed reasons such as "it's nice to help"), (g) Eisenberg-Berg, Department of Psychology, Arizona stereotype of natural or majority behavior (child State University, Tempe, Arizona 85281. justifies behavior by saying that such behavior Copyright 1979 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0012-1649/79/1502-0228$00.76 228

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is natural and/or that anyone would assist in the given situation), (h) needs of others orientation or needs-oriented reasoning (child refers to another's psychological or physical needs as a justification for behavior, e.g., "he's hungry"), (i) pragmatic orientation (child justifies behavior with practical, nonmoral reasons), (j) "wanted to" orientation (child justifies behavior with verbalizations analogous to "I wanted to"), and (k) unclassifiable responses. Percentage of exact agreement between coders for each of the moral categories ranged from 50% to 100%, with percentage of agreement being 89% or higher for all categories except pragmatic orientation (79% agreement) and approval and interpersonal orientation (50% agreement, one out of two incidents). Each subject was assigned nine percentile scores, one for each of the nine types of moral reasoning used by the children (totaling 100% across all categories for each subject). The mean percentage scores for the nine categories were as follows: (a) authority/punishment orientation, no use of this category; (b) hedonistic orientation, 3.9%; (c) orientation to mutual gain, 14.3%; (d) affectional relationship orientation, 10%; (e) approval and interpersonal orientation, 4.9%; (f) stereotyped good/bad orientation, 1,1%; (g) stereotype of majority or natural behavior, no use of this category; (h) needs of others orientation, 24.5%; (i) pragmatic orientation, 24.5%; (j) "want to" orientation, 15.5%; (k) unclassifiable 1.7%. Statistics testing the difference between two independent proportions revealed no significant sex or age (48-54 months versus 55-63 months) differences in mean percentile scores. The children most frequently explained their own prosocial behavior with references to the needs of others and pragmatic considerations. References to mutual benefits, friendship, and the fact that the benefactor wanted to help or share were also common justifications. None of the preschoolers exhibited any of Kohlberg's Stage 1 authority and punishment reasoning. Stereotyped, hedonistic, and approval-oriented reasoning were also infrequently verbalized. The meaning of children's "needs of others" reasoning is not entirely clear. Although Kohlberg (Note 1) claimed that reference to another's needs when the other's needs do not conflict with one's own needs or desires is a type of pragmatic, Stage 2 reasoning, he did not explicitly discuss concern with others' needs when the other's needs do conflict. However, previous

research on prosocial moral judgment (Eisenberg-Berg, Note 2) indicated that the labeling of others' needs when those needs conflict with one's own needs intercorrelates with and loads on the same factor as empathic, sympathetic moral reasoning, and is unrelated to or negatively correlated with Kohlberg's stage 2 hedonistic reasoning. Furthermore, preschoolers' needs-oriented reasoning has been correlated with a naturalistic measure of sharing in the preschool class (Eisenberg & Hand, in press). Thus, it is logical to suggest that preschoolers' references to others' needs when justifying prosocial acts represent a primitive empathic orientation. Such an empathic concern was often conveyed to the experimenter via the child's nonverbal behavior and tone of voice. In brief, empathic concerns appeared to frequently motivate the children's prosocial behavior. The present study demonstrates a methodology that can be used to tap children's moral reasoning about their own naturally occurring behavior. Additional research is needed to examine children's reasoning about antisocial behaviors (e.g., aggression, dishonesty, lack of self-control), and to examine the relationship of moral judgments about spontaneous behaviors to reasoning about similar hypothetical incidents. Reference Notes 1. Kohlberg, L. Coding manual. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, undated. 2. Eisenberg-Berg, N. The development of prosocial moral reasoning. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, New Orleans, March, 1977.

References Damon, W. The social world of the child. San, Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977. Eisenberg-Berg, N., & Hand, M. The relationship of preschoolers' reasoning about prosocial moral conflicts to prosocial behavior. Child Development, in press. Kohlberg, L. Stage and sequence: The cognitivedevelopmental approach to socialization. In D. Goslin (Ed.), The handbook of socialization theory and research. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969. Piaget, J. The moral judgment of the child. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. Ugurel-Semin, R. Moral behavior and moral judgment of children. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1952, 47, 463-474.

Received March 23, 1978 •