Abstract: The purpose of the study was to investigate how children in Western and Eastern culture develop the understanding of friendship. Both 80 Icelandic and Chinese subjects were interviewed at ages of 7, 9, 12 and 15. They were presented with an interpersonal-moral conflict in which the protagonist had to decide whether she or he kept a promise to the best friend or accepted an interesting invitation from a third child. A categorical manual for scoring the content of socio-moral reasoning was developed. According to the manual the reasons for action choices as well as reasons for the moral judgments of these choices were analyzed. The results showed that the conflicts were interpreted differently in both cultures. For the Icelandic children promise keeping in close friendship conflicts with egoistic interests, however, the Chinese children interpreted the situation as a conflict between an old friendship and interpersonal responsibility toward the new child. The results also showed that at ago of 15, there were no more cultural differences in the use of the reasoning categories. It seems to be universal trend that adolescence is a period where close friendship is extremely important.

Key words: yr old, friendship, socio moral reasoning, cross cultural study