Development of punishment justifications: Individual conceptualisation or appropriation of collective knowledge?

The paper presents the results of a research study whose principal aim is to understand the relationships between collectively constructed knowledge and psychological conceptualisation processes. For this purpose, we studied the development of punishment justifications in children and adolescents (N = 216), aged between 6- and 17-years, attending school in Buenos Aires. The instrument used was an interview based on Piagetian clinical research methods. The results show there are three types of punishment justifications: utilitarian, retributive, and mixed, which are present across the age groups (with the exception of utilitarian justifications observed from the age of 10 years). However, we found differences in how participants evaluate the future consequences of punishment in both mixed and utilitarian justifications. The process of transforming arguments would indicate the presence of constructive conceptualisation processes in the different types of justifications. In conclusion, psychological processes of conceptualisation and appropriation of collective knowledge would not be mutually exclusive, but would be two dialectical poles with alternation in the relative dominance of one over the other.