Being Hurt and Hurting Others: Children's Narrative Accounts and Moral Judgments of Their Own Interpersonal Conflicts

The research reported in this Monograph documents the narrative accounts and moral evaluations that children between the ages of 5 and 16 made of incidents in which they had been the targets of their peers’ unfair or harmful actions and incidents in which they had been those inflicting harm on their peers. By systematically examining children’s construals of social interactions, this research brings to the fore the role of interpretation in moral thinking. By moving beyond the assessment of moral judgments made from an uninvolved third-person perspective, it underscores the possibility that children apply their moral concepts differently when they judge instances of harm or injustice from the victim’s or the perpetrator’s perspectives. Together, these issues bear on how children’s moral concepts are applied and develop within their actual social interactions, especially those interactions that appear to violate those very moral concepts. By contributing to our understanding of children’s moral thinking as it is manifested in their everyday interactions, this research also brings us a step closer to better conceptualizing the study of children’s moral behavior.