considered to be stages in which the predominate motive is to please other people. Standards, however, are said to be internalized.
Children operating on conventional moral thought want to be viewed as "good" by those persons whose opinions are important o them. They are now able to take the rules of authority figures well enough to decide whether an action is good by their own standards. The two stages of conventional morality are typically experience from age ten through age thirteen.
Regarding preconventional and conventional morality, it is also important to note that children do not merely pass from one stage of thinking into another in a short time interval. Rather there is a sort of transitional stage in which a child's moral thinking is characterized by one stage most of the time but evidences a lower or higher stage at least 25 percent of the time as well.
If the child is in transition, then he can be said to be a transitional thinker at such and such stage. On the other hand, if his level o
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