Morality and personal continuity in childhood: Further evidence supporting the early-onset view of moral identity development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Morality influences self-continuity judgments in children aged 7–8 years. • Negative moral changes disrupt self-continuity more than positive changes in older children. • Adapted vignettes clarified domain impacts on self-continuity for younger children. • Findings suggest moral identity emerges before adolescence, in middle childhood. The study extends previous research on older children, adolescents, and adults by investigating at what age morality becomes important for judgments of identity continuity in younger children. Participants ( N = 115) from two age groups—4 to 5 years and 7 to 8 years—were presented with scenarios involving changes in behaviour across moral, conventional, and personal domains, with variations in the direction of change (positive versus negative). Results revealed that 7- to 8-year-olds differentiated between the moral and personal domains, as well as between the conventional and personal domains in their judgments of identity continuity, while 4- to 5-year-olds did not, suggesting that morality becomes important for establishing identity continuity in middle childhood. The findings support an early onset view of moral identity development, according to which moral identity emerges between the ages of 5 and 7 years.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".