Abstract

The purposes of this study were 1) to examine the development of children's and adolescents' reasoning about sociomoral dilemmas, and 2) to determine the relation between honesty and kindness of sociomoral judgment to story solution. Two dilemma stones for assessing development of understanding relation between honesty and kindness were administered to 217 junior high school, and 157 senior high school students. The data were analyzed through content analysis, and chi-squares were applied to examine grades- and gender differences. The results showed significant grades- and no gender differences in sociomoral judgment. Adolescents' reasoning tented to be stereotyped, approval and interpersonally oriented Stereotyped judgments (honesty) of self-oriented reasoning or internalized values increased in frequency with age, and also judgments of interpersonally or approval-oriented reasoning (social lie as kindness) increased in use with age. Implications of the results and further research were discussed and suggested.