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 turning point 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.
| Keywords: | immanent justice; children judgmental characteristic |
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