The David Gribble Archive : Talks

Children don’t start wars

Leipzig University, 2008
Page 3

People often refuse to accept the idea of mental decline. One of the ways they try to get round it is by dividing intelligence into crystallised and fluid intelligence. Crystallised intelligence is knowledge and technique, and up to a certain age adults excel; fluid intelligence includes such things as imagination, the ability to learn new things, observation, spatial awareness and speed of thought, and here young people do best. However hard we argue, many aspects of intelligence certainly decline with age.

(c) This next idea is even less acceptable. We also decline morally.

We become gradually more self-centred and conformist and less and less sensitive to and concerned about the needs of other people.

For the time being, I shall just give one example from the experiments of the American psychologist Ervin Staub in the late sixties and early seventies. Children were asked to wait in a room by themselves. They would hear the sound of a falling chair in the next room, followed by crying and moaning from a young girl. After the age of eight or nine, the older the children were the less likely they were to go to see whether they could help. By thirteen they were less likely to try to help than nursery school children. When they were asked about it afterwards they said they were afraid of being told off by the researcher if they disobeyed him and left the room.

2. A bit about theories of moral development.

Peck and Havighurst worked with a group of 120 children who were born in a small town in the Midwest of the United States in 1933, and who were still living there ten years later. They identified five types of moral behaviour: amoral, when you seek only direct personal gratification; expedient, when moral behaviour occurs because you perceive some consequent advantage; conforming, when all that matters is not to stand out from the crowd; irrational-conscientious, when you have accepted some moral code and stand by it however absurd it may be; and rational-altruistic, when you are concerned for the welfare of others and take proper measures to achieve it. The first two types – amoral and expedient – were thought to be consecutive stages of development occurring in infancy and early childhood, the next two – conforming and irrational-conscientious – were thought to be parallel stages appropriate in later childhood; these were the stages where most people stopped advancing, and the final type – rational-altruistic – was thought to be rare.

I like these types, particularly the last three, but they are no longer seen as consecutive stages. In the late 1960s Norman and Sheila Williams found evidence of all five types in four-year-olds, who were the youngest children involved in their study. The reason that they went no younger than four was that their research depended on the children's articulacy. A standard interview was devised so that it could be used with a large sample – in fact 790 children were interviewed. They were asked about the meaning of such concepts as lying, fairness or bullying, and were then asked whether such actions were right or wrong, and why they were right or wrong.