The early ontogeny of human cooperation and morality
The seminal work in the modern study of children’s moral development is Piaget’s (1932/1997) The Moral Judgment of the Child. As is well known, Piaget claimed that before the age of 8 or 9 years children make moral judgments based only on a respect for authority and the social norms emanating from this authority-and so they are not really autonomous moral agents. But, as is also well known, Piaget focused exclusively on the explicit moral judgments that children were capable of formulating in language. Kohlberg’s extension of Piaget’s framework (e.g., Colby & Kohlberg, 1987; Kohlberg, 1969, 1976) also asked children to express their reasoned moral judgments linguistically, and also found that preschool children were essentially premoral (i.e., preconventional).
