Abstract
This paper addresses current research on children's concept of personal identity and its relation to morality. It was inspired by earlier online studies on adult respondents conducted by Strohminger and Nichols (The essential moral self, 2014).
Our team conducted an interview study in June 2017 on 218 Czech children and teenagers. An interviewer introduced each participant to a scenario in which a person (e.g. their friend) undergoes various changes after being closed in a special sci-fi chamber.
Changes encompassed 6 categories: physical, cognitive, moral, in character, in memory and in perception. Both negative and positive versions of the changes were included.
Respondents were asked to judge how much each of the changes would affect the person's identity core on a 7-point scale. Preliminary data analyses show that respondents consider moral traits to be significantly more important for personal identity preservation than any other category of traits.
The least important category, physical appearance, was rated much lower than any other category. Children also viewed negative change as more identity-changing than positive change, especially in the case of moral category.
The results are thus in accord with "the essential moral self" hypothesis.