Behavioral disordered children's conceptions of moral, conventional, and personal issues

This study employed a series of sorting tasks with 22 normal and 20 children with behavioral disorders (BD) to determine whether BD children discriminate among three classes of social actions viewed by normal children as distinct. These categories are (1) the moral (actions having intrinsic effects upon the rights or well-being of others), (2) the conventional (actions whose propriety is determined by social consensus), and (3) the personal (actions whose propriety is a matter of individual prerogative). Findings were that although BD children distinguished among the three forms of behavior, they differed with normals in the classifications of specific acts and in the reasons given for act classifications. Chief among these differences was the finding that BD children were less likely than normals to identify acts as within their personal domain.