Digital Environments Exposure, Empathy, Moral Judgement, and Literature Class

The article represents a part of an experiment conducted at the University of Maribor, where we observed how children perceive the ethical component in the first book of the Harry Potter series, the Philosopher’s Stone. In a group of children aged 9, 11, and 13, we observed their perception, understanding, and evaluation of ethical judgments in relation to the literary events in the Philosopher’s Stone. Like Kohlberg, we were interested not only in whether the children perceived and understood the actions of the characters acting, but also whether they were able to explain and evaluate the motivation behind the characters’ actions. We were also interested in whether mimetic association with the literary world or the ability to take the perspective of one of the literary characters, affects the child's empathy with the literary character and thus his or her ethical judgments about the characters' actions.