PS218 Final essay drafts

Draft 1

PS218 Essay

Question addressed: Q1. Ali aged 5 and Rohan aged 12 are siblings. Recently Ali has started telling Rohan off for behaving badly – how might a psychologist explain both of their behaviours?

Telling Off and Acting Out: A Developmental Account of Two Siblings' Behaviour

A psychologist asked why five-year-old Ali has begun reprimanding his twelve-year-old brother Rohan for "behaving badly" would resist treating the two behaviours as isolated quirks. Each is better understood as a developmentally appropriate product of where the child currently sits on overlapping cognitive, moral and social trajectories, expressed within the distinctive arena of the sibling relationship. Ali's policing reflects the rigid, rule-bound morality and emerging social understanding typical of early childhood, whereas Rohan's misbehaviour reflects the cognitive, neural and identity-related upheavals of early adolescence. This essay argues that the two behaviours are complementary expressions of normative development, and that the sibling bond is the stage on which both are played out and, at times, amplified.

Ali's tendency to tell his older brother off is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a marker of healthy moral development. Piaget (1932), drawing on observations of children playing marbles, proposed that between roughly five and ten years children occupy a stage of "moral realism" or heteronomous morality, in which rules are experienced as fixed, sacred and handed down by authority. A child in this stage does not treat rules as negotiable social agreements but as features of reality to be upheld, which is precisely why a five-year-old might appoint himself enforcer of "good behaviour." This maps onto what Kohlberg termed preconventional morality, in which right and wrong are defined by obedience and the avoidance of punishment rather than by abstract principle. Importantly, Ali's reprimands imply that he can already identify when a rule has been broken. Turiel (1998) demonstrated that children as young as four distinguish moral transgressions (such as hitting or stealing, which are wrong irrespective of what an authority says) from social-conventional ones (such as table manners, which can be changed by agreement), suggesting that Ali is not merely parroting adults but applying a genuine, if rigid, moral framework to his brother's conduct. The self-conscious, moral emotions that give rule-following its motivational force — guilt and shame — emerge in the second year of life (Barrett et al., 1993) and are well established by Ali's age, supplying the affective engine behind his disapproval.

Underpinning this is a developing theory of mind. To recognise that Rohan is "behaving badly," Ali must attribute intentions and evaluate behaviour against a standard. Wimmer and Perner (1983), using the false-belief paradigm, showed that around the age of four children become able to represent that others hold mental states distinct from reality, marking a shift towards genuine social understanding. At five, Ali is therefore cognitively equipped to interpret and judge his brother's actions. Crucially, the sibling relationship itself may have accelerated this capacity. Ruffman et al. (1998) found that children with older siblings perform better on theory-of-mind tasks, plausibly because negotiating the perspectives and intentions of a more advanced sibling scaffolds mentalising, and Hughes and Leekam (2004) similarly reported that family size is associated with false-belief comprehension. Dunn and Kendrick (1982) characterised siblings as a rich "initiation" into the social world of other people's intentions, emotions and needs, while Brown and Dunn (1992) found that children discuss their sibling's feelings roughly three times more often than their parents'. Ali's confident moral commentary is thus the visible output of a child whose social cognition has been sharpened precisely by living alongside Rohan.

Rohan's "bad behaviour," meanwhile, is the signature of early adolescence. The oldest framework here is the notion, advanced by Hall (1904), of adolescence as a period of "storm and stress" — moods, conflict and risk-taking driven by biology. Arnett (1999) refined this, concluding that storm and stress is likely but not inevitable: conflict with parents and authority does increase in early adolescence, even though most teenagers cope well overall. At twelve, Rohan sits squarely in the window when such friction peaks; Shanahan et al. (2007) found that parent–adolescent conflict reaches its height around the age of thirteen. A psychologist would also invoke neural immaturity. The adolescent brain is undergoing synaptic pruning and myelination, with the regions governing emotional regulation and response inhibition still maturing; Gogtay et al. (2004) documented the progressive reduction in grey matter across this period using averaged MRI scans. Behaviour that looks like wilful naughtiness may therefore partly reflect an as-yet underdeveloped capacity to inhibit impulses.

Cognitive and identity-related changes compound this. Elkind (1967) described "adolescent egocentrism," in which the newly acquired ability to think about others' thoughts initially outstrips the ability to differentiate them from one's own. This produces the "personal fable" — the conviction that one's own experiences are uniquely special and that consequences will not apply — which is linked to adolescent risk-taking, and the "imaginary audience," the feeling of being constantly watched and judged, which fuels self-consciousness and resistance to being told what to do (least of all by a younger sibling). Simultaneously, Erikson (1968) located the central task of adolescence in the conflict of identity versus role confusion; experimentation with roles, and even the adoption of a "negative identity" through deliberate rebellion, are part of resolving the question "Who am I?" Marcia (1980) operationalised this into identity statuses ranging from diffusion to achievement, treating active exploration as a normal and necessary phase rather than a problem. Closely related is the drive for autonomy: Steinberg and Silverberg (1986) described early adolescence as a period of individuation in which young people de-idealise their parents, recognise them as fallible, and seek independence. Rohan's misbehaviour can thus be read as boundary-testing in the service of autonomy and identity rather than mere delinquency. Indeed, Rohan may not even construe his own conduct as "bad": Smetana's social domain theory holds that adolescents increasingly reframe behaviours that adults treat as rule-governed as matters of personal jurisdiction, so being corrected at all — and especially by a younger sibling — may register as an intrusion on his autonomy. Following Moffitt's distinction between life-course-persistent and adolescence-limited antisocial behaviour, his conduct is also statistically most likely to be the transient, adolescence-limited variety that resolves with maturity.

What ties these two accounts together is that they unfold within a sibling relationship, which a psychologist would treat as a developmental context in its own right rather than mere background. Furman and Buhrmester (1985) found that sibling relationships comprise four independent dimensions — warmth, conflict, rivalry, and relative status or power — that coexist rather than cancel out, so a single pair can display both affection and friction, often on the same day. Ordinarily the firstborn holds the greater power, and Tucker et al. (2010) showed that such birth-order dominance persists even into adolescence, with larger age gaps producing more firstborn control. The intriguing feature of this case is the apparent reversal: the younger child is policing the older one. Developmentally this makes good sense, because Ali's behaviour is age-typical assertion of rules at exactly the life stage when rule-enforcement peaks, while Rohan's is age-typical rule-breaking. The seven-year gap means the brothers are not competing for the same developmental niche; instead they occupy opposite poles of the moral spectrum at once, which is why their behaviours dovetail so neatly. Far from being purely destructive, such friction may even be productive: Dunn and Munn (1986) found that preschoolers who engaged in frequent sibling conflict were especially likely also to show prosocial behaviour, implying that disputes are an arena for rehearsing social and emotional skills. A psychologist would, however, add a caution drawn from Kowal and Kramer (1997), who showed that perceived differential parental treatment increases sibling hostility; how this dynamic develops would therefore depend partly on whether Ali and Rohan feel their parents treat them even-handedly.

In sum, a psychologist would explain Ali and Rohan's behaviours not as oppositional problems but as two faces of normal development meeting within the sibling relationship. Ali's reprimands reflect the heteronomous, rule-bound morality of early childhood (Piaget, 1932), an early grasp of moral versus conventional rules (Turiel, 1998), and a theory of mind sharpened by growing up with an older brother (Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Ruffman et al., 1998). Rohan's misbehaviour reflects the neural immaturity, egocentrism (Elkind, 1967), autonomy-seeking (Steinberg & Silverberg, 1986), and identity exploration (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1980) of early adolescence. The sibling bond, with its coexisting warmth and conflict (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985), is the stage on which these trajectories collide. In keeping with the dynamic, multi-determined view of behaviour that runs throughout developmental psychology, the most accurate explanation is one that holds biology, cognition, morality and relationship context together rather than privileging any single cause.