Developmental Test Lee Flashcards
What is the background to Lee?
The social context of a lie is important. In some situations honesty will conflict with other moral values and may be different for different cultures(eastern and western). There may be cultural differences in moral thinking as well as moral reasoning.
What was the aim?
To see if the Chinese and Canadian children would rate truth telling and lie telling differently in pro social and anti social settings.
How many participants?
120 Chinese
108 Canadian(36 7 year olds, 40 9 year olds and 32 11 year olds).
What were the conditions?
Ethnicity of child
The age(7,9,11)
Type of story(social or physical
Pro social or anti social settings
What was the antisocial truth telling physical story?
Ryan tearing pages from a book to make aeroplanes(whether that was good or naughty)
The teacher noticing and asking whether he did it and him saying ‘I did it’
What was the prosocial truth telling physical story?
Jenny cleaning the yard of litter(is that good or naughty)
Teacher noticing and Jenny saying ‘I did it’
What was the anti social lie telling story?
Paul pushed over Jimmy(was that good or bad)
Teacher noticed and asked who did it Jimmy said ‘I did not’
What was the pro-social lie telling story?
Kelly secretly put money in Anne’s pocket so she could go on the trip(was that good or naughty)
Teacher noticed and asked if she knew who did it ‘I did it’ (was that good or naughty)
What was the method?
The children were randomly allocated to either social or physical story condition. They then had to use to the rating scales to answer the question. Each child listened to four social or physical stories. The meaning of the symbols was respected each time the question was asked and the good and naughty meanings were alternated, counterbalancing was also done
What were the results?
No significant difference between the order stories were given or gender so these variables were ignored?
For the question every good deed had a Positive rating and bad deed had a bad rating
As they got older Chinese children began to rate lie telling in a positive light and gave it a higher than truth telling in good deed situations.
Canadian children showed western moral thinking of disapproving of lie telling in every situation across all ages.
What were the findings?
Prosocial/truth telling
No significant difference
Prosocial/lie telling
Children in each culture and each age rated the lie telling differently. Chinese began to rate the lie telling as they grew up
Anti social/truth telling
No signifying difference
Anti social/lie telling
Significant difference between age groups with negative ratings increased with age irrespective of culture.
What was the Chinese justification?
Nearly half of the Chinese children said that the child in the truth telling pro social story had been begging for or wanting praise.
A third said you shouldn’t leave your name after doing a good deed or you shouldn’t tell the teacher, and this was repeated for rating lie telling positively in the pro social situation.
What was the conclusion?
Moral development is different in different cultures as a result of social-cultural norms and practices not only as a result of cognitive development as proposed by earlier research.
