KOREAN AND AMERICAN CHILDRENS CONCEPTS OF ADULT AND PEER AUTHORITY

The primary purpose of this research was to examine Korean children's concepts of authority. Children's judgments about commands of persons with varying age, social position, and knowledge were assessed. 48 sub jects from the first, third, and fifth grades were presented with port rayals of persons giving children commands regarding two types of even ts: fighting and a game rule dispute. Subjects evaluated the legitimac y of commands and chose between different persons giving opposing comm ands. with regard to a command to stop fighting, subjects accepted the legitimacy of adult and peer authorities, as well as an adult without a position of authority. Subjects rejected commands that failed to pr event harm even when given by an adult authority. With regard to a gam e rule dispute, subjects most heavily weighted knowledge in evaluating the authority commands. The findings show that Korean children do not have a unitary orientation to adult authority, and have implications for an understanding of individuals' conceptions in the context of a c ultural ideology emphasizing reverence for authority. A second study, with a group of fifth graders from the United States, was conducted to determine how the game event task or cultural influences accounted fo r some differences between previous findings in the U.S. and the findi ngs with the Korean children. The second study showed that whereas the U.S. children mainly respond in ways similar to the Korean children, the U.S. children gave more priority to pragmatic considerations; the Korean children gave more priority to the attribute of the authority's knowledge.