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Lee, Cameron, Xu, Fu and Board's 1997 study is the contemporary study for the developmental theme of moral development, and it makes an ideal counterweight to Kohlberg. Where Kohlberg argued that moral reasoning develops through a universal sequence common to all cultures, Lee and colleagues set out to show that at least one important moral judgement — how children evaluate lying and truth-telling — is powerfully shaped by the culture the child grows up in. By comparing Chinese and Canadian children of the same ages on the same task, they were able to demonstrate that two groups of children, developing along Kohlberg's ladder, nonetheless reach systematically different moral evaluations of the same acts — and that these cultural differences grow as children get older and absorb more of their society's values. The study is thus a direct, evidence-based challenge to the strong universality claim of classic moral-development theory.
This lesson tells the study in the OCR "tell the story" format: the background (the universality debate and the specific role of cultural values about modesty); the aim; the method (its cross-cultural design, the sample of Chinese and Canadian children, and the story-and-rating procedure); the results with their real pattern of findings; the conclusions; and a full evaluation of method, data, ethics, validity, reliability, sampling and cultural reach. It closes by linking the study to its theme, the developmental area, the relevant perspective and debates. Because Lee is the cross-cultural, contemporary half of the moral-development pair, it is examined both in its own right and constantly against Kohlberg.
| This lesson covers | OCR H567 Component 02 element | AO focus |
|---|---|---|
| Background: the universality debate; cultural values (modesty) and evaluating lies | Section A — Developmental; theme: moral development (contemporary) | AO1 knowledge |
| Aim (whether culture shapes children's evaluations of lying and truth-telling) | Section A — Core study (Lee) | AO1 |
| Method: cross-cultural design; sample (n, ages, cultures); story-and-rating procedure | Section A — Core study | AO1; AO2 |
| Results (Chinese vs Canadian ratings of pro-social and anti-social lies/truths) | Section A — Core study | AO1 |
| Conclusions (moral evaluation is culturally shaped and diverges with age) | Section A — Core study | AO1; AO3 |
| Evaluation: method, data, ethics, validity, reliability, sampling, ethnocentrism | Section A; Section B debates | AO3 |
| Links to theme, area (Developmental), perspective, debates | Section B — Areas, perspectives, debates | AO1; AO3 |
The specification is referenced descriptively; consult the official OCR H567 specification document for its exact published wording. This lesson develops AO1 (aim, procedure, results, conclusions), AO2 (applying cultural analysis to novel moral judgements) and AO3 (evaluating the study's cross-cultural method and generalisability).
The intellectual backdrop to Lee's study is exactly the strong universality claim made by Kohlberg and, before him, Piaget: that moral development follows a common path across cultures because it reflects a universal growth in reasoning. If that claim is right in its strongest form, then children of the same age in very different societies should evaluate the same moral acts in broadly the same way. Lee and colleagues suspected this was too simple. They reasoned that while some deep features of morality might be universal, the evaluation of particular acts — especially acts whose moral status depends on social conventions — is likely to reflect the specific values a culture transmits to its children.
Lying and truth-telling is a superb test case for this, because its moral status is not obvious and varies with context and culture. Every society teaches children that lying is generally bad and honesty generally good; but every society also recognises situations where the picture is more complicated — "white lies", tactful untruths, and above all lies told out of modesty. And here Chinese and Western cultures differ in an instructive way. Traditional Chinese culture, influenced by Confucian values, places a high premium on self-effacement and modesty: drawing attention to one's own good deeds is frowned upon, and understating them — even to the point of denying them — can be seen as virtuous. Western culture, by contrast, tends to prize honesty and individual credit: owning up to one's good deeds is straightforwardly good, and denying them looks like a needless or even suspect untruth.
This sets up a precise, testable prediction. Consider a child who does something good — say, tidies the classroom — and is then asked by the teacher who did it. If the child truthfully takes the credit, a Western culture that prizes honesty should rate this positively, while a Chinese culture that prizes modesty might rate the same self-promoting truth less positively. Conversely, if the child modestly denies having done the good deed — a lie, but a self-effacing one — a Western culture should rate this lie negatively (it is, after all, untrue), while a Chinese culture that prizes modesty might rate the same modest lie more positively. In other words, the identical behaviour — a modest lie about a good deed — should be evaluated oppositely by the two cultures, precisely because the two cultures weight honesty and modesty differently. Meanwhile, for straightforwardly anti-social acts (a child does something bad and then lies to cover it up), the researchers expected the two cultures to agree: covering up wrongdoing with a lie should be rated negatively everywhere, because no cultural value about modesty comes into play.
There is a further, developmental twist that makes the study more than a simple culture comparison, and it is the feature that ties it firmly to the developmental area. Cultural values are not present in a child from birth; they are absorbed gradually through socialisation. So Lee predicted not just that the two cultures would differ, but that the difference would grow with age — that seven-year-olds, having absorbed less of their culture's specific values, would differ less between the two nations, while eleven-year-olds, more thoroughly socialised, would differ more. If found, this age-by-culture pattern would be strong evidence that the divergence is learned from the culture rather than innate: a genuinely developmental finding about how moral evaluation is acquired. This prediction — that cultural differences in moral judgement emerge and widen across childhood — is what makes the study a study of moral development and not merely of moral difference.
It is worth being clear about why the age prediction is so much more powerful, evidentially, than the bare culture comparison. Suppose Lee had simply found that Chinese and Canadian children differ in how they rate modest lies. On its own, that finding would be open to an awkward objection: perhaps the difference is not learned at all but reflects some fixed, pre-existing difference between the two groups — a response-style difference, or even (in the crudest misreading) an innate one. But the age pattern closes off that objection. If the cultural difference is small in the youngest children and grows as children get older, then it cannot be a fixed, pre-existing difference — because a fixed difference would be just as large at seven as at eleven. A difference that widens with age can only be explained by something that accumulates with age, and the obvious candidate is socialisation: the progressive absorption of the culture's values. So the developmental design does not merely add detail; it provides the decisive evidence that the divergence is culturally learned. This is a beautiful example of how a developmental (age-graded) design can rule out explanations that a one-off comparison cannot, and it is exactly the sort of methodological insight that earns credit in an evaluation.
A second reason lying-and-truth-telling is such a well-chosen topic is that it lets Lee build in a control condition in the form of the anti-social stories. Because both cultures share the value that covering up wrongdoing is bad, the anti-social items provide a baseline on which the two cultures should agree — and if they do agree there, but diverge on the pro-social items, then the divergence cannot be dismissed as a general tendency of one group to rate everything more or less positively than the other. The anti-social stories thus act as a check that any pro-social divergence is specific to the culturally-loaded judgement, not an artefact of how the two groups use the scale. Designing the materials so that the study contains its own internal control is a mark of methodological care, and noting it strengthens an evaluation of the study's validity.
The aim was to investigate whether culture affects children's moral evaluations of lying and truth-telling, and whether any cultural differences change with age — by comparing how Chinese and Canadian children of different ages judged the same stories in which a character told the truth or lied about a pro-social (good) or anti-social (bad) deed. The underlying question was whether moral evaluation is universal (as strong stage theory implies) or culturally shaped and developmentally acquired.
The study was a cross-cultural comparison using an independent-measures design, with culture (Chinese vs Canadian) and age (three age groups) as between-group variables, and the type of story (pro-social vs anti-social) and whether the character lied or told the truth as within-task variations. The children's ratings of the acts and statements were the dependent measure. This factorial design let the researchers see not only whether the cultures differed overall, but whether they differed specifically on pro-social lies (where the modesty value should bite) versus anti-social lies (where it should not), and whether the difference grew with age.
The participants were around 120 Chinese children (from the People's Republic of China) and about 108 Canadian children, giving a total of roughly 228 children, spread across three age groups of approximately 7, 9 and 11 years. The two national samples were drawn from broadly comparable school populations in their respective countries. Using three age bands within each culture was essential to the design, because the developmental prediction was precisely that the cultural gap would widen from the youngest to the oldest band.
The key materials were a set of short stories (vignettes), each depicting a child who carried out either a pro-social act (a good deed, such as helping someone or a good deed done for the class) or an anti-social act (a bad deed, such as harming someone or a misdeed). In each story, the acting child was then questioned (typically by a teacher) about what they had done, and either told the truth or lied about it. This produced the crucial combinations: a good deed + truth (owning the good deed), a good deed + lie (the modest denial), a bad deed + truth (owning the misdeed), and a bad deed + lie (covering up the misdeed). Children rated the story character's deed and their statement using a developmentally appropriate rating chart — a symbol-based scale (for example, a set of faces or stars running from very good to very naughty) that even young children could use to express how good or bad they judged each act and each statement to be.
Each child was tested individually. The stories were read to the child, matched to their language and culture (Mandarin for the Chinese children, English for the Canadian children), with care taken that the translated versions were equivalent in meaning. After each story, the child was asked to rate how good or naughty the story character's deed was, and separately how good or naughty the character's statement (the truth or the lie) was, by pointing to a symbol on the rating chart. Because the scale was symbol-based and simple, it was suitable across the whole 7-to-11 age range and across both cultures. The ratings were then compared across culture, age, story type (pro-social/anti-social) and statement type (truth/lie) to reveal where the cultures agreed and where they diverged.
The findings supported the central prediction: the two cultures agreed about anti-social situations but diverged about pro-social ones, and the divergence grew with age — exactly the pattern expected if moral evaluation is culturally learned.
| Situation | Canadian children | Chinese children |
|---|---|---|
| Anti-social deed, told truthfully ("I did the bad thing") | Rated positively (owning up is good) | Rated positively (broad agreement across cultures) |
| Anti-social deed, lied about ("I didn't do it") | Rated negatively (covering up is bad) | Rated negatively (broad agreement across cultures) |
| Pro-social deed, told truthfully ("Yes, I did the good thing") | Rated very positively (honesty prized) | Rated less positively than Canadians (self-promotion discouraged) |
| Pro-social deed, lied about (modestly denying it) | Rated negatively (a needless lie) | Rated more positively than Canadians (modesty valued) |
Several patterns matter for the exam:
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