Jean Piaget was a Swiss biologist who devoted his life to studying cognitive development in children He thought that both the kinds of thing that children think about and the ways in which they can think about them, change as they gain more experience of the world. By using this hypothesis he conducted an experiment and came up with stages that would better define this behaviour. .
In order to find out what children of various ages thought about telling the truth, cheating, stealing and similar bad behaviour, Piaget developed the story-telling technique. This technique investigates whether children are aware of the consequences of an action. This is the technique I am going to use.
For example, in the first of two stories that Piaget came up with, a little boy stole a loaf of bread to give to his friend who was very poor and starving. In a second story a little boy fancied a cake so stole one from a shop.
In the first story, the dishonest act was committed for a good reason and in th second it was committed for a selfish reason. However, a loaf of bread is larger than one cake, and pre-operational children judge by appearances. Being egocentric they can't understand intentions either. Many claimed the first child was more wicked than the child in the second story.
Piaget claimed that children from around the age of seven are acquiring operational thought. They are becoming able to take other things such as consequences, motives and intentions into account when making moral judgements. They can see that deliberate lying is worse than exaggeration or accident.
Piaget suggested two stages in the development of moral reasoning. The first is the stage of heteronomous morality (or the stage of moral realism). The stage of heteronomous morality reflects pre-operational and concrete-operational thinking. Children accept that all rules are made by some authority figure. Breaking the rules will lead to immediate and severe punishment.