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

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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.

General Information

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

Journal rubric: Empirical Research

Article type: scientific article

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17759/sps.2019100306

For citation: Znamenskaya I.I., Alexandrov Y.I. Development of moral attitudes toward out-group members in 3—11-year-old urban and rural children. Sotsial'naya psikhologiya i obshchestvo = Social Psychology and Society, 2019. Vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 85–99. DOI: 10.17759/sps.2019100306. (In Russ., аbstr. in Engl.)

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Information About the Authors

Irina I. Znamenskaya, Associate Researcher at The V. B. Shvyrkov Laboratory of Psychophysiology, Institute of Psychology RAS, Psychologist, Charity Foundation “Light in Hands”, Moscow, Russia, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4021-9843, e-mail: znamenirina@gmail.com

Yuri I. Alexandrov, Doctor of Psychology, Head the Laboratory of the Institute of Psychology RAS and Head. the Department of Psychophysiology State University of Humanitarian Sciences, Institute of Psychology Russian Academy of Science, Head of Laboratory of Neurocognitive Research of Individual Experience, Institute of Experimental Psychology, Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, Moscow, Russia, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2644-3016, e-mail: yuraalexandrov@yandex.ru

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