The need for educational leaders to be conscious of the values influencing the morality of their decisions and for a way of guiding them as ethical educators emerged from the authors' research into leadership decisions involving the use of student achievement data. A conceptual framework is proposed as influenced by six interrelated…

Research on the Happy Victimizer Phenomenon has mainly focused on preschool and schoolchildren, with a few studies also including adolescents and young adults. The main finding is that young children, despite knowing that harming someone is wrong, ascribe positive feelings to perpetrators and offer hedonistic justifications, interpreted as a lack…

What does it take know a moral truth or principle? Although testimony is an undisputed source of empirical knowledge of contingent facts, it is less clear whether it is possible to acquire "second-hand moral knowledge" (Jones, 1999; Wolff, 1998). In the present studies, 3- to 5-year-old Chinese (N = 124) and U.S. American (N = 90)…

Although values are closely related to moral psychology, morality is a developmental problem in psychology. However, what the problem is, is to confine to reduce development and maturation to individual psychology. The fact that social-psychological characteristics of the values have not been emphasized, indicates concerns of the integrity of the…

Background: The capacity of people with Down syndrome (DS) to combine intent and severity of consequences information when judging the level of blame that should be attributed to an offender was compared with that of controls. Method: The technique used did not require verbalisation. Twenty-five people with DS and 25 typically developing persons…

For every decision teachers make, there is an ethical or moral reason behind it. Whether the decision centers on students, themselves, colleagues, families, communities, policy, or law, underlying this decision is a belief, a driving force that influenced the decision. How that teacher came to that decision is the beginning of this research. This…

People's moods can influence moral judgment. Such influences may arise because moods affect moral emotion, or because moods affect moral thought. The present study provides evidence that, at least in the footbridge dilemma, moods affect moral thought. The results of two experiments are reported in which, after induction of positive, negative, or…

This study is based on Jones's ("Academy of Management Review" 1(2):366-395, 1991) theoretic model and explores the relationship between perceived moral intensity and the first three stages (moral recognition, judgment, and intention) of the ethical decision-making process for school principals. A survey consisting of four scenarios was…

Moral decision making has recently attracted considerable attention as a core feature of all human endeavors. Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging studies about moral judgment have identified brain areas associated with cognitive or emotional engagement. Here, we applied graph theory-based network analysis of event-related potentials…

Video games have the potential to be contexts for moral learning. We investigated whether "Quandary," a video game designed to promote ethical thinking and moral considerations for decision-making, would help promote positive skills such as perspective taking and empathy in adolescents. We examined the effect of playing…

This study was conducted to investigate the moral development of one hundred Kuwaiti high school teachers. They ranged in age from 23 to 48 years with a mean of 28.6 years and a standard deviation of 8.3 years. The teachers' individual moral judgment levels were assessed by the Defining Issues Test (DIT)--an objective test designed by James Rest…

Extant models of moral judgment assume that an action's intentionality precedes assignments of blame. Knobe (2003b) challenged this fundamental order and proposed instead that the badness or blameworthiness of an action directs (and thus unduly biases) people's intentionality judgments. His and other researchers' studies suggested that blameworthy…

To test young children's false belief theory of mind in a morally relevant context, two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, children (N=162) at 3.5, 5.5, and 7.5 years of age were administered three tasks: prototypic moral transgression task, false belief theory of mind task (ToM), and an "accidental transgressor" task, which measured a…

Teachers at eight elementary schools in a large metropolitan school district participated in a multi-year program of professional ethical dilemma discussions that took place at monthly school meetings over a two-year or three-year period and focused on real-life situations faced by elementary school teachers. Discussions were structured using the…

Do moral judgments hinge on the time available to render them? According to a recent dual-process model of moral judgment, moral dilemmas that engage emotional processes are likely to result in fast deontological gut reactions. In contrast, consequentialist responses that tot up lives saved and lost in response to such dilemmas would require…