<P> Storytelling in everyday life is used as an indirect form of teaching . Stories embedded with lessons of morals, ideals, and ethics are told alongside daily household chores . Most children in Indigenous American communities develop a sense of keen attention to the details of a story with the goal of learning from them, and to understand why people do the things they do . The understanding gained from a child's observation of morality and ethics taught through storytelling allows them to participate within their community appropriately . </P> <P> Specific animals are used as characters to symbolize specific values and views of the culture in the storytelling where listeners are taught through the actions of these characters . In the Lakota tribe, coyotes are often viewed as a trickster character, demonstrating negative behaviors like greed, recklessness, and arrogance while bears and foxes are usually viewed as wise, noble, and morally upright characters from which children learn to model . In the stories, trickster characters often get into troubles, thus teaching children to avoid exhibiting similar negative behaviors . The reuse of characters calls for a more predictable outcome that children can more easily understand . </P> <P> Intergroup exclusion context provides an appropriate platform to investigate the interplay of these three dimensions of intergroup attitudes and behaviors, prejudice, stereotypes and discrimination . Developmental scientists working from a Social Domain Theory (SDT: Killen et al., 2006; Smetana, 2006) perspective have focused on methods that measure children's reasoning about exclusion scenarios . This approach has been helpful in distinguishing which concerns children attend to when presented with a situation in which exclusion occurs . Exclusion from a peer group could raise concerns about moral issues (e.g. fairness and empathy towards excluded), social - conventional issues (e.g., traditions and social norms set by institutions and groups) and personal issues (e.g., autonomy, individual preferences related to friendships), and these can coexist depending on the context in which the exclusion occurs . In intergroup as well as intragroup contexts, children need to draw on knowledge and attitudes related to their own social identities, other social categories, the social norms associated with these categories as well as moral principals about the welfare of the excluded, and fair treatment, to make judgments about social exclusion . The importance of morality arises when the evaluation process of social exclusion requires one to deal with not only the predisposed tendencies of discrimination, prejudice, stereotypes and bias but also the internal judgments about justice equality and individual rights, which may prove to be a very complex task since it often evokes conflicts and dilemmas coming from the fact that the components of the first often challenge the components of the latter (Killen, Lee - Kim, McGlothlin, & Stangor, 2002). </P> <P> Findings from a Social Domain Theory perspective show that children are sensitive to the context of exclusion and pay attention to different variables when judging or evaluating exclusion . These variables include, social categories, the stereotypes associated with them, children's qualifications as defined by prior experience with an activity, personality and behavioral traits that might be disruptive for group functioning and conformity to conventions as defined by group identity or social consensus . In the absence of information, stereotypes can be used to justify exclusion of a member of an out - group (Horn 2003, Killen and Stangor, 2001). One's personality traits and whether he or she conforms to socially accepted behaviors related to identity also provide further criteria for social acceptance and inclusion by peers (Killen, Crystal, & Watanabe, 2002; Park, Killen, Crystal, & Watanabe, 2003). Also, research has documented the presence of a transition occurring at the reasoning level behind the criteria of inclusion and exclusion from childhood to adolescence (Horn, 2003). As children get older, they become more attuned to issues of group functioning and conventions and weigh them in congruence with issues of fairness and morality (Killen & Stangor, 2001) </P>

Which of the following is a critical emotional factor in a person's moral development