Does Role Playing Improve Moral Reasoning's Structures in Young Children?

Does Role Playing Improve Moral Reasoning's Structures in Young Children?

Veronique Salvano-Pardieu, Manon Olivrie, Valérie Pennequin, Briony D. Pulford
Copyright: © 2020 |Pages: 24
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1811-3.ch009
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Abstract

This chapter presents a research on moral judgment with pre-school and first-year school children. This research promotes, through the use of mimes and role playing, the development of moral reasoning and its components such as Theory of Mind and Perspective Taking of the other. The authors wanted to develop in 5-year-old children the ability to understand the intent of the other in social interactions and moral judgment. According to the authors, if children learn taking into account the perspective of the others through role playing, they will improve their cognitive abilities involved in social interactions and will be more capable of developing Theory of Mind. This will lead them to adopt a more pro-social behavior. This research paves the way to new pedagogical perspectives by showing that developing mime, role playing, and argumentation with young children to explain conflict, impacts the “intention evaluation system”, the theory of mind and system 2 which is involved in rational and controlled reasoning.
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Introduction

This chapter presents research on moral judgment with pre-school and first-year school children. The aim of this research project was to promote, through the use of role playing, the development of moral reasoning and its components, such as Theory of Mind and Perspective Taking. Our aim was to develop in 5-year-old children the ability to understand the intent of the other person in social interactions and moral judgment. We contend that if children learn to take into account the perspective of other people by role playing then they will improve their cognitive abilities involved in social interactions and will be more capable of developing Theory of Mind. This should also lead them to adopt more pro-social behaviors. Our research paves the way to new pedagogical perspective by showing that role-playing and argumentation with young children to explain conflict, has an impact on the “intention evaluation system”, the Theory of Mind and system 2, which is involved in rational and controlled reasoning. It also promotes better understanding of social interactions and therefore better social adaptation.

Moral judgment is the process by which one defines and judges what is bad or wrong versus good or right, or ethical versus unethical as established by rational consensus in a social group. Moral judgment regulates social behavior (Malle, Guglielmo, & Monroe, 2012) and allows community life. Recent research on moral judgment claims that the structures within moral judgment rely on different components of which the most important are deontic reasoning, Theory of Mind (ToM) (Fontaine, Salvano-Pardieu, Renoux & Pulford, 2004; Salvano-Pardieu, et al., 2016), emotion and inhibitory control (Buon, Seara-Cardoso, & Viding, 2016). We are inclined to believe that these components are subdivided in two systems, one evaluating the action and its consequence, relying on deontic reasoning and emotion, and the other evaluating the intention of the actor and relying on ToM.

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