Preschoolers' Self-image and Moral Behavior

Our work is devoted to the study of the link between moral behavior and moral self-awareness. Any free and correct moral choice in a difficult alternatives situation represents not an automatic but a conscious act. Up to now, however, it has not been possible to establish a lawful link between moral consciousness and behavior. Numerous failures of such attempts have led certain authors ([9], [10], and others) to think that a moral action is the result of the interaction between various behavioral tendencies (both acquired and originally inherent). It is mediated by cognitive factors to the extent that any other behavioral act is. It is true that the proponents of cognitive theory postulate that a moral action must be mediated by moral judgments and ideas per se, that it must stem from universal moral criteria and correspond to moral values that can be consciously apprehended by the individual. But they are unable to say how the cognitive function affects the performance function or what is theoretically represented by the relation between the general moral criteria by which an individual is guided and the choice he makes among particular alternatives. Without an understanding of this factor, even positive correlations between characteristics of moral judgments and actual behavior remain incomprehensible [8].