1. Children’s conceptions of bullying and repeated conventional transgressions: moral, conventional, structuring and personal-choice reasoning
- Author
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Noor Daud, Robert Thornberg, Rebecca Alamaa, and Ulrika Birberg Thornberg
- Subjects
Logical reasoning ,Aggression ,05 social sciences ,Judgement ,050301 education ,Experimental and Cognitive Psychology ,Moral reasoning ,humanities ,Education ,Developmental psychology ,Harm ,Moral development ,Social cognition ,Value judgment ,Developmental and Educational Psychology ,medicine ,0501 psychology and cognitive sciences ,medicine.symptom ,Psychology ,0503 education ,Social psychology ,health care economics and organizations ,050104 developmental & child psychology - Abstract
This study examined 307 elementary school children’s judgements and reasoning about bullying and other repeated transgressions when school rules regulating these transgressions have been removed in hypothetical school situations. As expected, children judged bullying (repeated moral transgressions) as wrong independently of rules and as more wrong than all the other repeated transgressions. They justified their judgement in terms of harm that the actions caused. Moreover, whereas children tended to judge repeated structuring transgressions as wrong independently of rules (but to a lesser degree than when they evaluated bullying) and justified their judgements in terms of the disruptive, obstructive or disturbing effects that the actions caused, they tended to accept repeated etiquette transgressions by arguing that the acts had no negative effects or simply that the rule had been removed. The findings confirm as well as extend previous social-cognitive domain research on children’s socio-moral reasoning.
- Published
- 2014
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