The relation of moral orientation and moral judgment to prosocial and antisocial behaviour of Chinese adolescents

Abstract

The present study investigated the relation of moral orientation and moral judgment to prosocial and antisocial behaviour from a first‐person perspective. The major findings support the following four hypotheses. (la) The moral orientation of girls is higher than that of boys, and (1b) boys are more delinquent than girls; (2) the moral orientation of prosocial adolescents is higher than that of delinquent adolescents; (3) the moral judgment of prosocial adolescents is higher than that of delinquent adolescents; and (4) the moral development of prosocial adolescents is higher than that of delinquent adolescents. Few researchers have attempted to investigate how moral orientation and moral judgment relate to prosocial and antisocial behaviour in a single study. The present study fills this research gap. Moreover, the study of moral judgment from a first‐person perspective appears to be a meaningful and useful approach. Future studies should be conducted to investigate whether moral judgment from a first‐person perspective is more predictive of moral behaviour than moral judgment from a third‐person perspective. It would also be meaningful to conduct a cross‐cultural study to investigate the relation of moral orientation and moral judgment to prosocial and antisocial behaviour in different cultures. The use of a self‐report method in a study of prosocial and antisocial behaviour has certain limitations; for example, respondents may not give honest responses. However, this method has been found to be useful and acceptable, especially for researching the correlations among a large number of variables.