抄録
The purpose of this study was to investigate the development of prosocial moral judgments in Japanese children and adolescents. The prosocial moral-judgment assessment consisted of four moral dilemmas based on stories used in Eisenberg-Berg (1979) and designed to tap prosocial moral reasoning. One hundred and forty preschool, elementary, junior and senior-high school children were individually interviewed to assess their level of prosocial moral reasoning. The results in terms of prosocial moral judgments indicated that no clear age and sex differences were evident, and that most subjects judged prosocially to each dilemma. When prosocial moral reasonings were coded into moral consideration categories devised by Eisenberg-Berg, responses of older subjects tended to be in higher level of reasoning categories. In general, the number of subjects indicating higher level of prosocial moral reasoning appeared to increase with age. These results seemed to show that the developmental stages of prosocial moral judgments suggested by Eisenberg (1982) were also observed in Japanese children and adolescents.
