Kids care about environment as ‘nature is living’ more so than why important to humans - creative implications?
This article over on the BPS discusses a study in which children rated different types of transgressions and mundane decisions (moral, against the person, against others, bad manners and against the environment). Transgressions against other people emerged as the worst of all, followed by harms against the environment, and then bad manners.
“Asked to justify their judgments about environmental harm, 74 per cent of the explanations given referred to “biocentric” reasons (e.g. “A tree is a living thing and, it’s like, breaking off your arm - someone else’s arm or something”); 26 per cent invoked anthropocentric reasons (e.g. “Because without trees we wouldn’t have oxygen”). The ratio of these categories of explanation didn’t vary by age, but did vary by gender, with girls more likely to offer biocentric reasons. This fits with a wider, but still inconclusive, literature suggesting that women tend to base their moral judgments on issues of care, whereas men tend to base their moral judgments on issues of justice.”
more info over here
image via flickr
