ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

›› 2000, Vol. 32 ›› Issue (02): 190-196.

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A RESEARCH ON THE JUDGMENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF“IMMANENT JUSTICE” AMONG CHILDREN AGED 6-10 IN CHINA

Liu Junhao (Office Affairs Administration Bureau of shanghai 200003) Cen Guozhen (Department of Applied Psychology, Shanghai Teachers University 200234)   

  • Published:2000-06-25 Online:2000-06-25

Abstract: Facing a person's misdeed and the following adversity, children have the characteristics of making "immanent justice" judgment which reflected the person's moral development. This was pointed out by J. Piaget. But R Karniol's study showed different results and put forward a different viewpoint. In this research, having 106 subjects aged 6 to 10 in China. the structure, content and factorial control of the situational stories used as research materials were more thoroughly considered than those of Piaget and Karniol. The results showed that there were four categories of responses to such kind of situations among Chinese children, the nature of these responses were closely related both with moral maturation and with the development of causality reasoning ability. The turnpoint from precausal explanations to mature causal analysis on these situations was at about eight years old among children in China. The influencing factors, such as the structure and content of the situational stories, and the "internal justice", which might be included indistinctly among responses, were also thoroughly discussed.

Key words: immanent justice, children judegmental characteristic