Abstract

Past work on moral mindsets has largely overlooked the adolescent developmental period, a time when adolescents are navigating the complexities of moral life and experiencing tensions between important moral principles and their own actions. This study investigated how moral incrementalism and essentialism are linked to how adolescents construct meanings about their moral experiences. The sample included 96 Canadian adolescents (12- to 15-years of age; M = 13.5 years). Adolescents generated written narratives of times when they acted inconsistently and consistently with a moral value, and completed a vignette-based measure of moral mindsets. Moral incrementalism was associated with references to the psychological and emotional facets of experiences and engaging in meaning-making processes in narratives. Adolescents who endorsed incrementalism disengaged less only when narrating a self-discrepant experience, indicating some context-specificity across moral event types. Overall, results contribute to scholarship on moral mindset and narrative identity construction. Findings illuminate how individual differences in youth’s views of moral traits and behavior may be associated with important aspects of moral identity development such as delving into the psychological and emotional facets of their experiences and engaging in meaning-making processes.