Development of moral attitudes toward out-group members in 3—11-year-old urban and rural children

Abstract

This paper describes the experiment, which tested the hypothesis that urban and rural children´s moral attitudes toward out-group members are developed by systemic differentiation, i.e. their subjective experience´s complication. Participants are 179 3—11-year-old children from Moscow and Alexandrov Gay (Saratov region town). Children solved moral dilemmas dedicated to in-out-group conflict. The significant difference between younger and older children’s strategies was revealed: younger children are tending to support in-group members, whereas older children tending to support victims, even if they are out-group members. This trend is universal for both urban and rural children. The data is discussed within system-evolutionary approach.

Keywords

• systemic differentiation
• moral development
• urban and rural children
• attitudes toward out-group members
• 3—11-year-old children
• socialization