Psychosocial Growth, Gender, Morality

Continuing Psychosocial Growth Stage

  • Intimacy vs. Isolation:
    • Age range: 20-40 years
    • Central issue: "Am I ready for a committed relationship?"
    • Virtue/Strength: Love
  • Generativity vs. Stagnation:
    • Age range: 40-65 years
    • Central issue: "Have I given something to future generations?"
    • Virtue/Strength: Care
  • Integrity vs. Despair:
    • Age range: >65 years
    • Central issue: "Has my life been meaningful?"
    • Virtue/Strength: Wisdom

Midlife Crisis

  • Most researchers agree with a midlife questioning period.
  • Vocational Adjustment:
    • Some suggest it is related to vocational adjustment.
    • More susceptible to unemployment leading to financial instability.
  • Self-Actualization:
    • Others point to self-actualization.
    • Question: "Am I reaching my full potential?"

Late Adulthood

  • Integrity versus Despair
    • Represents complete psychosocial growth.
  • Life Review
    • Involves reminiscing and reflecting on unresolved conflicts of the past to come to terms with oneself.
    • Finding new meaning and coherence in their lives.
    • Preparing for death.

Gender Role and Sexuality

Sex and Gender

  • Biological Sex:
    • Defined by physical characteristics that distinguish male and female.
    • Genetic female: XX chromosome.
    • Genetic male: XY chromosome.
    • X and Y chromosomes influence brain development via prenatal hormones.
  • Gender:
    • Incorporates features that society associates with or considers appropriate for men and women.

Gender Roles, Stereotypes, & Identity

  • Gender Roles:
    • Patterns of behavior that females and males should adopt in a particular society.
  • Gender-Role Norms:
    • Society’s expectations or standards concerning what males and females should be like.

Gender Roles, Stereotypes, & Identity

  • Gender Stereotypes:
    • Overgeneralized and largely inaccurate beliefs about the characteristics of all males and all females.
    • Generated by society’s gender norms.
    • Many originate from a grain of truth.

Gender Roles, Stereotypes, & Identity

  • Physical difference between the sexes
    • Women’s ability to bear and nurse children
    • Women have adopted the role of child-bearer and nurturer.
      • Shaped the gender-role norms.
  • Communality of women
    • Orientation that emphasizes connectedness to others and includes traits of emotionality and sensitivity to others.
  • Agency of men
    • Orientation toward individual action and achievement that emphasizes traits of dominance, independence, assertiveness, and competitiveness.

Gender Similarities / Differences?

  • Physical differences are usually larger
  • Janet Hyde argues for gender similarities
    • Males and females are similar on most, but not all, psychological variables.
    • More alike than different.
    • Between-sex differences can be no greater than within-sex differences (Hyde, 2005).

Gender Similarities / Differences?

  • Average levels of a behavior may be noticeably different for males and females.
    • Within each sex, there are extremes.
  • Why do unfounded stereotypes persist?
    • Biased perceptions
      • Focusing on between-sex differences and ignoring within-sex variations.
    • Social-role theory
      • Differences in the roles that women and men play in society do a lot to create and maintain gender stereotypes.

Explaining Gender-Role Development

  • Biosocial theory
    • Complex interaction of:
      • Biology
      • Social experience
      • Individual’s behavior
    • e.g., Androgenized females: girls prenatally exposed to excess androgens.

Influence of nurture

  • Social learning theory
    • Children learn masculine or feminine identities, preferences, and behaviors through two processes:
      • A. Differential reinforcement
      • B. Observational learning
  • Gender-role development
    • A. Which behaviors do people reinforce or punish?
    • B. What sorts of social models are available?

Explaining Gender-Role Development

  • Cognitive theories
    • Gender-role development depends on cognitive development
      • Children must acquire understanding of gender
    • Children actively socialize themselves
      • Actively seek same-sex models and a range of information about how to act like a girl or a boy.

Cognitive theories of Gender-Role Development

  • Kohlberg’s gender constancy theory: 3 stages
Stages
  • Gender identity
    • Age: Birth – age 2
    • Features:
      • Children label themselves as males or females
      • “I am a boy”
  • Gender stability
    • Age 2 – 4
    • Features:
      • Gender identity is stable over time
      • “When you grow up, will you be a mommy or a daddy?”
  • Gender constancy
    • Age 5 – 7
    • Features:
      • Gender is also stable across situations (it is not altered by external appearances)
      • cf. decentration in concrete operational stage

Explaining Gender-Role Development

  • Gender schemata theory
    • Gender understandings and gender-typed behaviors develop together
    • Similar to Kohlberg
      • Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire values, interests, and behavior consistent with cognitive judgments about self
    • Different than Kohlberg
      • Self-socialization begins as soon as children acquire a basic gender identity

Nature & Nurture

  • Developmental Period
    • Events & Outcomes:
      • Pertinent Theory
  • Prenatal period
    • Events & Outcomes:
      • The fetus develops male or female genitalia, which others will react to once the child is born.
      • Pertinent Theory : Biosocial
  • Birth – 3 years
    • Events & Outcomes:
      • Parents and other companions label the child as a boy or a girl; they begin to encourage gender consistent behavior and discourage cross-sex activities
      • Pertinent Theory : Social learning
  • 3-6 years
    • Events & Outcomes:
      • Children begin to seek information about sex differences, form gender schemata, and actively try to behave in ways viewed as appropriate for their own sex.
      • Pertinent Theory : Gender schema
  • 7 to puberty
    • Events & Outcomes:
      • Children finally acquire the concepts of gender stability and consistency.
      • Pertinent Theory : Cognitive development
  • Puberty and beyond
    • Events & Outcomes:
      • The biological changes of adolescence, with social pressures, intensify gender differences and stimulate formation of an adult gender identity.
      • Pertinent Theory : Biosocial, Social learning, Gender schema, Cognitive development

Acquiring Gender Stereotypes

  • Rigidity about gender stereotypes
    • High during the preschool years (around ages four to seven)
    • Decreases over the elementary school years
  • Understanding that their biological sex will remain constant
    • Intolerant of anyone violating traditional gender-role standards

Gender-Typed Behavior

  • Children behave in gender-appropriate ways
    • Boys tend to choose “boy” toys; girls choose “girl” toys
    • Boys spend more time playing sports
  • Children begin to favor same-sex playmates as early as 30-36 months of age
  • Elementary school
    • Gender segregation:
      • separating themselves into boy and girl peer groups
      • interacting more with their own sex than other sex

Gender identity

  • Adolescents become:
    • Highly intolerant of role violations
    • Stereotyped in their thinking about the proper roles of males and females in adolescence
  • Gender intensification
    • Process where gender differences may be magnified by:
      • Hormonal changes of puberty
      • Increased pressure to conform to gender roles

Changes in Gender Roles

  • David Guttman’s parental imperative theory
    • Gender roles and gender-related traits in adulthood are shaped by the parental imperative
      • Requirement that mothers and fathers adopt different roles to raise children successfully
      • Men must emphasize their “masculine” qualities to feed and protect their families
      • Women must express their “feminine” qualities to nurture the young, meet the emotional needs of their families

Social Cognition and moral development

Theory of mind

  • Understanding that people have mental states such as desires, beliefs, and intentions
  • These mental states guide their behavior

Theory of mind

  • Typical measure:
    • False belief task
  • A false belief task assesses the understanding that:
    • People can hold incorrect beliefs
    • These beliefs, even though incorrect, can influence their behavior

Theory of mind

  • Abilities considered important early steps in developing a theory of mind
    • Joint attention
    • Understanding intentions
    • Pretend play
    • Imitation
    • Emotional understanding
    • Implicit theory of mind
  • Most of these skills are deficient in children with autism

Theory of mind

  • Wellman proposed children’s theory of mind develops in two phases
    • Desire psychology
      • Adopting the {desire -> behavior} relation
      • I want, I hate, she wants, she hates
    • Belief-desire psychology
      • Both desires and beliefs (even false ones) determine behavior
      • “She did it because she thought …”

Milestones in ToM development

  • Age
    • Achievements
  • Birth to 2
    • Achievements Joint attention, understanding of intentions, pretend play, imitation, emotional understanding
  • Age 2
    • Achievements Desire psychology
  • Age 4
    • Achievements Belief–desire psychology
  • Age 5 and beyond
    • Achievements Understanding of second-order beliefs, sarcasm, different views of reality

Perspectives on Moral Development

  • Three basic components of morality
    • Emotional component
      • Feelings regarding right or wrong actions that motivate moral thoughts
    • Cognitive component
      • How we think about right and wrong and make decisions about how to behave
    • Behavioral component
      • How we behave when we experience the temptation to cheat or are called upon to help a needy person

Moral Emotion: Psychoanalytic Theory and Beyond

  • Moral emotions → moral behavior
  • Early relationships with parents → moral development
  • Children must internalize moral standards to behave morally even when no authority figure is present
  • Prosocial behavior
    • positive social acts, that reflect concern for the welfare of others
  • Antisocial behavior
    • behavior that violates social norms, rules, laws, etc.

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Reasoning

  • Level
    • Stage
      • Descriptions
  • Pre-conventional
    • Stage 1: Punishment-and-Obedience Orientation
      • The goodness or badness of an act depends on its consequences
    • Stage 2: Instrumental Hedonism
      • Conforms to rules to gain rewards or satisfy personal needs
  • Conventional
    • Stage 3: “Good Boy” or “Good Girl” Morality
      • What is right is now what pleases, helps, or is approved by others. People are often judged by their intentions.
    • Stage 4: Authority and Social Order-Maintaining Morality
      • Now what is right is what conforms to the rules of legitimate authorities and is good for society as a whole
  • Post-conventional
    • Stage 5: Morality of Contract, Individual Rights, and Democratically Accepted Law
      • There is an understanding of the underlying purpose of laws, concern that rules should be arrived through a democratic consensus
    • Stage 6: Morality of Individual Principles of Conscience
      • Individual defines right and wrong on the basis of self- generated principles

Moral Behavior: Social Learning Theory

  • Moral cognition is linked to moral action through self-regulatory mechanisms
    • Involve monitoring and evaluating our own actions
  • Moral disengagement
    • Allows us to avoid condemning ourselves when we engage in immoral behavior, even though we know the difference between right and wrong (Kam, 2020)

Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Morality

  • Research has found prosocial acts by toddlers
    • Helping
      • Fourteen-month-old infants spontaneously help adults
    • Cooperation
      • Fourteen-month-old infants participate in cooperative games
    • Altruistic rather than selfish motivations
      • Before age two, infants show greater happiness when they give treats to appreciative puppet, than when they receive them

Early Moral Training

  • Kochanska has studied development of conscience, which involves mastering two components:
    • Moral emotions
      • Associating negative emotions with violating rules and learning to empathize with people who are in distress
    • Self-control
      • Being able to inhibit one’s impulses when tempted to violate internalized rules
    • By age 18-24 months, toddlers show visible signs of emotional distress or guilt when breaking toys

Moral Understandings

  • Piaget and Kohlberg believed that:
    • Young children were primarily focused on the consequences of acts
  • However, even three-year-olds can take both intentions and consequences into account
  • By age four:
    • Children’s moral thinking becomes more sophisticated
    • They have the basics of a theory of mind
    • Distinguish between different kinds of rules

Moral Understandings

  • Children distinguish between different kinds of rules
    • Moral rules
      • Standards that focus on the welfare and basic rights of individuals
      • Only moral rules as absolute, sacred, and unchangeable
    • Social-conventional rules
      • Standards determined by social consensus that tell us what is appropriate in particular social settings
    • Understanding that moral rules are more compelling and unalterable than social-conventional rules

Moral Socialization

  • Proactive parenting strategies
    • Tactics designed to prevent misbehavior, reducing the need for discipline
  • Approaches to discipline
    • Love withdrawal
    • Power assertion
    • Induction (best strategy to foster moral development)
      • More often positively associated with children’s moral maturity
      • Invokes empathy

Moral Socialization

  • Kochanska’s research shows that children are likely to be easiest to socialize if they are:
    • By temperament fearful or inhibited
      • Likely to experience guilt when they do wrong
      • Avoid distress in the future
    • Capable of effortful control
      • Are able to inhibit their urges to engage in wrongdoing

Changes in Moral Reasoning

  • 10-year-olds
    • Preconventional reasoning
  • Teen years
    • Conventional reasoning as the dominant mode of moral thinking
  • Adulthood
    • Postconventional reasoning, if it emerges at all

Antisocial Behavior

  • Social information-processing model of aggressive behavior
    • Our reactions to frustration, anger, or provocation depend on the ways in which we process and interpret cues in situations
    • Aggressive youth develop a hostile attribution bias (Crick & Dodge, 1994)

Antisocial Behavior

  • Patterson’s coercive family environments
    • Highly antisocial children and adolescents:
      • Often grow up in coercive cycle based family environments
      • Family members are locked in power struggles
      • Trying to control the others through negative, coercive tactics

Three Different Ethics

  • Inform moral thinking around the world and that the balance of them differs from culture to culture
  • Cultural-developmental perspective on morality
    • Ethic of Autonomy
      • concern with individual rights and not harming or violating the rights of others
    • Ethic of Community
      • emphasis on duty, loyalty, and concern for the welfare of family members and larger social group
    • Ethic of Divinity
      • emphasis on divine law or authority, individual is to follow God’s laws and strive for spiritual purity

Moral Intuition and Emotion

  • Dual-process model of morality
    • Deliberate thought and intuition/emotion play distinct roles
      • Explain why we sometimes make judgments based on quick, emotion-based intuitions
      • Other times make judgments using more deliberative cognitive processes
    • Use different parts of the brain to make intuitive and deliberative moral decisions