Lying and killing: language and the moral reasoning of twelve- and fifteen-year-olds by social group.

Twenty groups of children of different social class, ethnic, national and regional backgrounds were matched by non-verbal reasoning ability and school experience. Their moral stances on "lying" and "killing" and their reasons for those stances were recorded orally on a one-to-one basis, using a school setting conducive to concentration and uninhibited communication. Individual literacy levels had no influence on results. There was an impressive consistency in moral attitudes and in reasons offered for those attitudes across children of quite different social backgrounds. There was also a very common access to higher level, autonomous reasoning among the adolescents surveyed. A strong link between moral development and language development can be inferred from the findings, but the parallel is not clear cut.