#Modern domainer magazine series#

In her review chapter in the Handbook of Moral Development in 2006, Judith Smetana reports the types of age-related changes within the moral domain that researchers have documented. In straightforward situations, children and adolescents give priority to morality in complex situations, individuals weigh a number of considerations that take different priority depending on the salience and associated informational assumptions. Studies have demonstrated how individuals apply the moral domain to complex issues, such as those involving cultural expectations, rights, exclusion, parent-adolescent conflict, autonomy, environmental issues, bullying, and emotions. Extensive empirical observations have been conducted to examine the types of responses children, peers, and adults use in response to transgressions. In addition, moral domain methodology involves analyzing the types of reasons individuals give for their evaluations of acts and transgressions. Children as young as three and a half years of age use these criteria to evaluate moral transgressions. For the moral domain, for example, for the issue of physical harm, an interviewer could ask a child whether it would be okay to hit if a teacher did not have a rule against hitting (authority jurisdiction), whether the rule could be changed (alterability), whether the rule applies in other settings (generalizability), whether it is wrong to hit someone if there is no punishment (punishment avoidance), and whether the act was wrong if there was no rule about it (rule contingency). Researchers have identified social knowledge domains using a set of criteria that define each domain and justifications that reveal the underlying reasoning about issues within the domain. Since the 1980s extensive empirical research has demonstrated the multiple ways in which children, adolescents, and adults evaluate social events using these categories of knowledge. According to moral domain theory, the morality includes concepts of physical harm, psychological harm, the distribution of resources, freedoms, and rights. Beginning in early childhood, children construct moral, societal, and psychological concepts in parallel, rather than in succession, as is proposed by global stage theory (in which children are first selfish, then oriented to familial and societal regulation, and then formulating principled morality in adolescence). In his book The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention (1983), Elliot Turiel outlined three domains of knowledge: the moral (principles of how individuals ought to treat one another), the societal (regulations designed to promote the smooth functioning of social groups and institutions), and the psychological (an understanding of self, others, and beliefs about autonomy and individuality).

#Modern domainer magazine series#

In contrast to global stage theories outlined by Lawrence Kohlberg, in which morality is viewed as a series of hierarchical stages, moral domain theory proposes that moral reasoning is distinct from other forms of social knowledge, such as societal and psychological knowledge. Moral domain theory has proposed that individuals acquire moral concepts about fairness, others ’ welfare, and rights (the “moral ” domain) beginning in early childhood, and that this knowledge develops during childhood and adolescence.