Ethics, Customs, Personal Field Of Cognitive Development Research Of 8-17 Year-old Children

Social cognitive domain theory uses the special domain perspective to describe and explain children’s moral, conventional and personal developmental characteristic. This study used the method of social cognitive domain theory to describe the8,11,13, and17years old children’s cognition of personal domain, and then explored how the cognition of personal domain affected the children’s moral judgment in the situation of personal domain conflict with moral domain. The main results are as follows:(Ⅰ) The first study investigates the children’s differentiation and understanding of moral, personal and conventional domain. The results show that all the children can make a distinction between moral events and unmoral events from the seriousness, the university, and the dependence to rule or authority;11,13, and17years old children can distinguish between the conventional events and personal events from the criterions of the seriousness and personal permissibility, but the8can not. All the children justified moral judgments with reference to moral reasons and conventional reasons;8,11,13years old children justified conventional events with conventional reasons, but17year old children also used personal reasons. Children’s reasons to personal events were varied by the kinds of events and the age of children.8year-old children justified personal events with conventional and prudential reasons, personal reasons only to P1; Personal, conventional, and prudential reasons are used in the reasoning of P1, P2, P3, P4by the11,13,17years old children; All the children never used personal reasons to P5.(Ⅱ) The second study preliminarily investigates the children’s moral judgment in the conflict scenarios between moral and person. The children’s evaluation of the seriousness was affected by the obvious of moral characteristics, higher significantly with higher scores. To the moral transgressions, children’s individual permissive judgment was significantly lower than the probative, but as the children grow older, the proportion of affirmative answers would be a small rise. The17-year-old children group was significantly higher than other groups.In collusion,8-year-old children’s range of personal domain was very limited, they also regarded the personal domain events as prudential or conventional; As the children grew older, the delimitation of personal domain were wider, but the17years old children had the phenomenon of personal expansion.11,13,17years old children recognized the personal control of personal events, but also considered social norms, adults’ expectations, security and so on. The cognition of personal domain had a negative impact on the moral judgment in the scenarios of moral domain confliction with personal domain.