The Seventh-Grade Moral Compass

Last week the Wall Street Journal shared about a recent Michigan State University study of seventh-graders looking at the connection between morality in real life and online.  In other words, what’s acceptable to a 12 or 13-year-old online and what’s acceptable in person? Here’s an excerpt from the article about the findings:

The study showed that greater Internet use correlates with a greater acceptance of “Internet harm,” which included threatening others over email and reading other people’s emails without asking. And overall, while the findings indicate that real-world morality hinted at how children view questionable online behavior, the relationship was weak, says Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State and the principal investigator for the study.

That suggests that other factors are influencing online morality, she says. “There’s a disparity in the ways kids think about morality or virtue in the virtual world and the real world. There’s something else that goes on.”

What the “something else” is still isn’t clear. “We have to better understand how they conceptualize that world, whether they really think it is separate in some way.”

Moral reasoning in virtual reality begs a few different questions.  Some have to do with the type of world we are developing for ourselves and kids, wherein our online behaviors take a distinct shape that we sometimes surprisingly discover is inconsistent from our real-time behaviors.

Another set of questions might explore whether this phenomenon is really any different from adolescent culture in general.  Drawing from the constructs of our colleague Chap Clark, we could look at this as more evidence that kids operate out of a different sense of morality, safety, and self in the adolescent “world beneath” than when they are operating in the world of adults.

We’re probably also safe to say that a seventh-grader’s moral compass fluctuates quite a bit from day to day… and that one of the joys of youth ministry is that we get to come alongside them as they navigate decision-making along this crazy ride.

©2009 Fuller Youth Institute