Untitled

Background to Lee's study

• Piaget found that the moral judgements of children about lying depends on factuality (how different it is from the truth) to a large extent and whether the lie was punished.
• At age 11, children also take into account whether the person purposely deceived.
• This study was conducted to bridge the gap in previous research by directly testing the effect of culture on children's moral evaluations of telling the truth and lying.
• Moral judgements are defined as opinions a person can make when deciding whether an action is good or bad.
• An individualistic culture is made up of people that stress the needs of the individual over the needs of the group as a whole.
• A collectivist culture is made up of those who value the needs of the group over the individual.
• Cross-cultural research involves comparison of cultural traits across a sample of societies.
• A cross-sectional study collects a sample of participants of different ages to see what the different age groups are/are not capable of.

Procedure

• Lee et al aimed to see if Chinese and Canadian children would differ in how they rated truth-telling and lie-telling in pro-social settings, where someone had done something good.
• They also aimed to see if Chinese and Canadian children would differ in how they rated truth-telling and lie-telling in anti-social settings, where someone had done something bad.
• Each participant was presented with a series of four stories and they would be asked two key questions in relation to each story. Each child would be given a story involving the following:
• One story would show pro-social behaviour (doing something good) and then truth-telling.
• One story would show pro-social behaviour (doing something good) and then lie-telling.
• One story would show anti-social behaviour (doing something bad) and then truth-telling.
• One story would show anti-social behaviour (doing something bad) and then lie-telling.
• However, so that the researchers could find out more about what within a story might have an effect, the stories took one of two different forms:
• Half of the children heard a story showing a child conducting a deed directly affecting another child (the social story condition)
• Half of the children heard a story showing a child conducting a deed involving only physical objects, although also having social implications (the physical story condition)
• This study was a cross-sectional study.

Procedure cont.

• Lee et al had 4 independent variables in the study:
• Nationality of the child (Chinese or Canadian)
• Age of the child (7, 9 or 11 years old)
• How the character behaved in the story (pro-social or anti-social)
• What was affected by the behaviour of the child (social or physical)
• The sample consisted of 120 Chinese children and 108 Canadian children. The Chinese children came from Hangzhou and the Canadian children came from New Brunswick. For the Chinese sample, there was 20 participants in each category.
• Children were allocated a condition on a random basis, and they were all seen individually.
• 
• Caption: The allocation in the Canadian section.

Results

• Analysis of the data focused on the background the children came from, the children's ages, and the particular story they were responding too. The key findings were for each story (1-4) were:
• Children of both cultures rated it positively but Chinese children rated less positively as they got older as they thought the children wanted praise
• Canadians rated lie telling negatively at all ages but Chinese children rated it more positively as they got older
• No significant differences and both cultures rated positively
• Both cultures rated negatively but as they got older, the age groups rated it more negatively
• Qualitative data included responses to the ratings.
• The conclusion was that there are differences in moral development between different cultures.