Moral Judgement

Piaget’s Theory of Moral Judgement

• Piaget interviewed children to examine their thinking about questions like; what counts as breaking a rule? what role does a person’s intentions play in morality? are certain punishments just? and how can goods be distrubuted fairly?

  • he presented these questions through stories, and as children heard them, they were asked which character was “naughtier” and why

• Piaget came to the conclusion that there are 2 stages of development in children’s moral reasoning (with a transition period between them)

  1. the outcome is more important than the intention

  2. the intention is seen as a paramount

• the 1st stage is referred to as heteronomous morality and is characteristics of children younger than 7 years of age who are in the preoperational stage

  • children in this stage regard rules and duties as law, and authorities’ punishments for noncompliance are always justified

• Piaget suggests young children’s belief that rules are unchangeable are due to social and cognitive factors

  • social: parental control of children is unilateral, leading to children having unquestioning respect

  • cognitive: children’s cognitive immaturity leads them to beleive rules are “real” things like chairs, and not products of the human mind

• After the first stage, children enter a transition period where interactions wtih peers lead them to be able to take one another’s perspective and to develop beliefs about fairness

• at around 11-12 years of age, children enter the second stage which is called autonomous morality

  • in this stage, children no longer accept blind obedience to authority as the basis of moral decisions. They understand rules can be changed if the majority agrees to do so, they consider fairness and equality as the most important factors to consider when making rules, and that punishments should fit the crime and adults are not always fair in delivering punishment

• children typically progress from heteronomous morality to autonomous moral reasoning, and difference in the rates are due to numerous factors including cognitive maturity, opportunities for interactions with peers, and how authoritarian and punitive their parents are

Critique of Piaget’s Theory

• Piaget underestimated young children’s abilty to appreciate the role of intentionality in morality

  • even young children think of intentions when evaluating other’s behaviour

  • it is clear that young children to not believe some actions like hurting others are right even when adults say they are

Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Reasoning

• Kohlberg proposed that the development of moral reasoning proceeds through a specific series of stages that are discontinuous and hierarchal and each stage reflects a more advanced way of thinking than the one before it

• he assessed moral reasoning by presenting children with hypothetical moral dilemmas and questioning them about the issues involved, one being the Heinz dilemma

• Kohlberg proposed there are 3 levels of moral reasoning - preconventional, conventional, and postconventional - and each has two stages within it

Preconventional Level

• preconventional moral reasoning is self-centered, and the child focuses on getting rewards and avoiding punishment

• stage 1: punishment and obedience orientation

  • a child’s moral actions are motivated by avoiding punishment

  • the child does not consider interests of others at all

• stage 2: instrumental and exchange orientation

  • what is right is what is in the best interest of the child or invovles equal exchange (ex. you hurt me, so I hurt you)

Conventional Level

• conventional moral reasoning is centered on social relationships, and a child is focused on compliance with social duties and laws

• stage 3: mutual interpersonal expectations, relationships, and interpersonal conformity orientation

  • good behaviour is what is expected by those close to the person

  • being good is important and entails having good motives, showing concern, and maintaining good relationships with others

• stage 4: social system and conscience orientation

  • moral behaviour involves fulfilling one’s duties, upholding laws, and contributing to society or one’s group

  • the individual is motivated to keep the social system going and to avoid a breakdown in its functioning

Postconventional/Principled Level

• this stage is centered on ideals and a child at this level focuses on moral principles

• stage 5: social contract or individual rights orientation

  • moral behaviour invovles upholding rules that are the best for the group, are impartial, or were mutually agrreed upon by the group

  • at this stage, one might reason that if society agrees the law is not benefiting everyone, it should be changed

• stage 6: universal ethical principles

  • moral reasoning at this stage asserts that principles must be upheld in any society regardless of majority opinion, and hwen laws violate them, the individual should act in accordance with these universal principles rather than the law

  • moral behaviour here is commitment to self-chosen ethical prinicples that reflect universal prinicples like basic human rights and liberty

• people who have higher-level cognitive and perspective-taking skills exhibit higher-level moral reasoning

Critique of Kohlberg’s Theory

• Kohlberg’s work has been useful in understanding how cognitive processes contribute to moral behaviour

• however, they have been criticized

  1. one criticism is that Kohlberg did not sufficiently differentiate between moral issues and issues of social convention

  2. another is that cultural differences in values were not taken into account

  3. another is related to Kohlberg’s argument that once an individual has attained a new stage, they rarely reason at a lower one, but research has shown that children and adults reason at different levels on different occasions

  4. an issue raised is whether gender differences exist in moral reasoning. Kohlberg fails to recognize the differences in which males and females reason morally based on how they are socialized

Social Domain Theory of Moral Development

• according to the social domain theory, growth in moral reasoning occurs through gradual change based on social interactions (implicit and explicit) with peers, adults, and parents

• it emphasizes the role of peers as a strong influence on children’s moral development

• it argues that children need to understand the principles in three different domains of social knowledge - the moral domain, societal domain, and the personal domain - for children to successfuly negotiate their social worlds

  • moral domain - the moral domain is based on concepts of right & wrong, fairness, justice and individual rights. These concepts apply across concepts and surpass rules or authority

    • ex. parents play an important role by teaching children cooperation and various perspectives

  • societal domain - the societal domain consists of the rules and conventions societies maintain order through

    • ex. choices about clothing, manners, forms of greeting

  • personal domain - the personal domain pertains to actions where individual preferences are the main consideration with no right or wrongs

    • it is centered around the development of autonomy and identity

      • ex. how children dress, spend their money, and choice of friends

• children (and to a lesser degree adolescents) believe parents have authority unless the parent gives commands that violate moral/societal principles

• regarding personal judgement, even preschoolers want autonomy and older children strongly believe they should have autonomy regarding themselves at home and at school

• parents usually feel they should have some authority over children’s personal choices, which is why parents and teenagers often battle in this domain, and parents often lose these battles

Cultural and Socioeconomic Similarities and Differences

• all human societies maintain social order through norms

• moral, societal, and personal judgements are found across cultures

• children’s ability to distinguish among the domains also appears across many cultures

• moral judgments are largely universal

• what issues fall within the societal domain or personal domain differ across cultures

  • ex. children in India beleive they have a clear moral obligation to attend to the needs of their parents, friends, and strangers while children in America appear to consider it a matter of personal judgment or a combination of moral and personal judgments

• religious beliefs may affect what is considered a moral judgment or societal judgement

  • ex. for religious youth, the crucial factor for societal judgements is God’s word in the Bible

• socioeconomic class can also influence the way children make such designations

  • ex. children of lower-income families are somewhat less likely than middle-class children to be stricter about moral and societal actions and less likely to view personal judgments as a matter of choice as those of low socioeconomic status place a greater emphasis on submission to authority and allow children less autonomy

The Development of Conscience

1. conscience pushes us to behave in appropriate ways and makes us feel guilty if we don’t

2. conscience is an internal regulatory mechanism that increases the individual’s abilty to conform to standards of conduct accepted in their culture

   • restrains antisocial behaviour and destructive impulses & promotes compliance with rules and standards

   • can also promote prosocial behaviour by utilizing guilt when acting in less than acceptable ways

3. conscience is tied to cultural standards

4. it is suggested that humans may have an innate drive to prefer helping actions than hindering ones

5. conscience develops slowly over time and children’s growing understanding of others’ emotions and goals as well as their increasing capacity for empathic concern are likely contributors to the development of conscience

6. children are more likely to take on parents’ moral values if their parents use disciplinary practices low in power and high in reasoning

   • adoption of parents’ values is also facilitated by a secure, positive parent-child relationship that inclines children to be open to and eager to internalize parent’s values

7. children with different temperaments may develop a conscience in different ways

   • ex. for infants that are prone to fear, gentle discipline with reasoning and nonmaterial incentives for compliance develops conscience

   • gentle discipline arouses fearful children just enough that they remember what thier mother tells them

8. gentle discipline seems to be unrelated to the development of conscience in fearless young children because it does not arouse attention

   • fearless children appear motivated more to please mother than by a fear of her

9. the effects of parenting on children’s conscience can vary with the child’s genes because genes affect children’s temperaments

   • ex. relation between maternal responsiveness & child’s genotype for the serotonin transporter gene SLC6A4

10. early development of conscience contributes to whether children come to accept the moral values of their parents and society

11. the nature of early parent-child disciplinary interactions sets the stage for children’s subsequent moral development

Prosocial Behaviour

The Development of Prosocial Behaviour

• the origins of prosocial behaviour are rooted in the capacity to feel empathy and sympathy

• empathy is identifying the emotions of others and understanding that another person is feeling an emotion or is in some kind of need

• sympathy is a feeling of concern for another in response to the other’s emotional state or condition

• in order for children to express empathy or sympathy, they must be able to take the perspective of others, and they can begin to do this as early as 14 months

  • 14 months - children become diestressed when seeing others in distress

  • 18-25 months - toddlers sometimes share a personal object with an adult they have seen being harmed to comfort

  • 2 years - more likely to comfort someone who is upset than become upset themselves, showing that they know who is upset

  • 2-4 years, some types of prosocial behaviours increase while others decrease

• cooperatoin is another form of prosocial behaviour that may be driven by sympathy and a child’s sense of fairness

  • child as young as 14 months of age were able to cooperate with another person to reach a mutually beneficial goal

• chimpanzee’s interactions are characterized by competition rather than cooperation, hinting that cooperative prosocial behaviour may have evolved especially in humans

The Origins of Individual Differences in Prosocial Behaviour

Biological Factors

• many have proposed that humans are biologically predisposed to be prosocial as collaboration in foraging for food and repelling enemies ensured survival

• genetic factors contribute to individual differences in empathy, sympathy, and prosocial behaviour

  • the role of genetics in the children’s prosocial concerns for others and prosocial behaviour increases with age

• genetics also affect empathy, sympathy and prosocial behaviour through temperament

  • children who tend to experience emotion without getting overwhelmed by it are especially likely to experience sympathy and act prosocially

  • children who are not responsive to others’ emotions may be unlikely to act prosocially

The Socialization of Prosocial Behaviour

• the primary environmental influence on children’s development of prosocial behaviour is socialization in the family. Parents socialize prosocial behaviour in children…

  1. by modeling and teaching prosocial behaviour

  2. by arranging opportunities for children to engage in prosocial behaviour

  3. by disciplining their children and eliciting prosocial behaviour from them

     (parents also communicate and reinforce cultural beliefs about the value of prosocial behaviour)

Modeling and the communication of values

• children tend to imitate other people’s helping and sharing behaviour

• children are especially likely to imitate the prosocial behaviour of adults they have a positive relationship

  • this explains why parents and children tend to have similar levels of prosocial behaviour, although heredity may also contribute

• the values parents convey to children may influence whetehr children are prosocial and toward whom they are prosocial

• sympathizing teaches children prosocial values

Opportunities for prosocial activities

• providing children with opportunities to engage in helpful activities can increase their willingness to take on prosocial tasks at a later time

• participation in prosocial activities may also give children and adolescents opportunities to take others’ perspectives, increase confidence that they are competent enough to assist others, and to experience emotional rewards for helping

  • forcing older adolescents into service activities can sometimes backfire and undermine their motivation to help

Discipline and parenting style

• high levels of prosocial behaviour and sympathy in children tend to be associated with constructive and supportive parenting, including authoritative parenting

  • prosocial sympathetic children may also elicit more support from parents

• a parenting style that involves physical punishment, threats, and an authoritarian approach tends to be associated with a lack of sympathy and prosocial behaviour in children and adolescents

• the way parents try to elicit prosocial behaviour from children is also important

  • ex. if children are regulary punished for failing to engage in prosocial behaviour, they may start to believe the reason for helping others is only to avoid punishment

• discipline that includes reasoning is particularly likely to foster children’s voluntary prosocial behaviour

  • this is because reasoning points out the consequences of the child’s behaviour for others, encourages perspective taking, and sympathy for others while providing guidelines children can refer to in future situations

• the combination of parental warmth and certain parenting practices seems to be especially effective in fostering prosocial tendencies in children and adolescents

Peer influences

• relationships with other children are key to the way children learn and practice moral principles like fairness, justice, reciprocity, conflict resolution, and not hurting or taking advantage of others

• a study found that pairs that had the highest levels of moral reasoning were almost the most successful at resolving conflicts

Interventions

• some school interventions have been effective at promoting prosocial behaviour in children, so environmental factors must contribute to prosocial development

• school-based interventions are divided into 3 levels: primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary intervention

  • primary prevention targets all individuals in a particular setting to prevent the occurence of a problematic behaviour or condition

  • secondary prevention helps individuals at risk for developing a problem or condition with the goal of preventing the problem or condition

  • tertiary intervention is a program designed to help individuals who already exhibit a problem or condition

• this is in a pyramid structure, with primary prevention at the bottom (taking up most the space) and secondary, follow tertiary

Antisocial Behaviour

• antisocial behaviour is any behaviour described as disruptive, hostile, or aggressive that violates social norms and harms others

• aggression is defined as any behaviour aimed at physically or emotionally harming others

The Development of Antisocial Behaviours

• Aggression emerges as early as before 12 months of age, and physical aggression starts at around 18 months and increases in frequency until about age 2 or 3

• with the growth of language skills, physical aggression decreases in frequency, and verbal aggression increases

• instrumental aggression is aggression motivated by the desire to obtain a concrete goal

  • ex. conflict over possessoins

• preschool children sometimes use relational aggression, which is aggression intended to harm others by damaging peer relationships

  • ex. excluding peers from activities or social groups

• whereas aggression in young children is usually instrumental, aggression is elementary school is often hostile due to the desire to hurt the other person or is motivated by defense of self-esteem

• children who engage in physical aggressoin also tend to engage in relational aggression

• the frequency of physical aggression decreases for most teenagers

• there is an overall developmental trend towards less physical aggression, but serious acts of violence increase in mid-adolescence along with property offenses, and status offenses

  • male adolescents engage in much more violent behaviour than females

• there is considerable consistency in individual differences in both girls’ and boys’ aggression across childhood and adolescence

• many children who are aggressive from early lief have neurological deficits that underlie problems like hyperactivity and difficulty paying attention

  • these deficits can result in troubled relation that fuel the child’s aggressive, antisocial pattern of behaviour

• those who have low impulse control and poor regulation of aggression continue to engage in troublesome behaviours and have some problems with their mental health and substance dependence until their mid 20s

The Origins of Aggression and Antisocial Behaviour

Biological Factors

• biological factors contribute to individual differences in aggression, but their precise role is not very clear

• twin studies suggest antisocial behaviour runs in families and is partially due to genetics

  • heredity appears to play a stronger role in aggression in early childhood and adulthood than in adolescence where environmental factors are a major contributor

• heredity contributes to proactive and reactive aggression, but the influence of heredity is greater for proactive aggression

• one genetically influenced contributor to aggression is difficult temperament

  • children who have problems with aggression and antisocial behaviour tend to exhibit a difficult temperament along with a lack of self-regulatory skills

  • they are also inclined toward aggression and criminal behaviour in late adolescence and violent crime in adulthood

• some aggressive children tend to have callous personality traits without guilt, empathy, or sympathy for others

  • they after often charming but insincere and this combination is especially likely to predict antisocial behaviour, aggression, and criminal behaviour in adolescence

Social Cognition

• children’s aggressive behaviours are often in reaction to how they interpret social situations

• they are more likely than nonaggressive children to assume hostile motives when the motive of the subject is unclear

  • ex. assuming a person spilling a drink on them is intentional, rather than accidental, and think they need to “get back” at them

• they are also more likely to be hostile in social situations and try to intimidate or get back at a peer

• most are more likely to describe their own aggressive behaviour as a natural reaction to the behaviour of others, but when it comes to their helping behaviours they don’t do this

  • ex. “he crashed his sled into me” when justifying their aggressive behaviour.

  • ex. when asked why a friend gave their friend a jacket, they say “he was cold without a jacket”, putting the focus on what their friend needed, but aggressive children do not do this

• aggressive children are inclined to evaluate aggressive responses more favourably and prosocial responses less favourably than others

  • this is because aggressive children feel more confident of their ability to be aggressive physically and verbally and they expect their aggressive behaviour to result in favourable outcomes as well as reducing negative treatment

• aggresive children are predisposed to aggressive behavioural choices, which in turn appears to increase their tendency to view aggressive behaviours positively, which increaes the level of future antisocial conduct

• reactive aggresion is emotionally driven, antagonistic aggression sparked by one’s perception that other people’s motives are hostile

• proactive aggression is unemotional aggression aimed at fulfilling a need or desire

Family Influences on Aggression and Antisocial Behaviour

• children who experience harsh or low-quality parenting are at a greater risk of becoming aggressive or antisocial than others

Parental punitiveness

• many children whose parents use harsh but non-abusive physical punishment are prone to problem behaviours in early years, aggression in childhood, and criminality in adolescence and adulthood

  • this is especially true when parents are cold and punitive in general and the child does not have an early secure attachment & difficult temperament and is chronically angry and unregulated

  • some researchers have argued that the relation between physical punishment and children’s antisocial behaviour varies across racial, ethnic and cultural groups

• harsh or abusive punishment is associated with the development of antisocial tendencies.

  • very harsh physical discipline leads to social cognition associated with aggression

• parents who use abusive punishment provide models of aggressive behaviour for children to imitate

• children’s behvaiour and parent’s punitive discipline has a reciprocal relation

  • children who are high in antisocial behaviour and exhibit psychopathic traits tend to elicit harsh parenting which increases problem behaviour and so the cycle continues

  • some recent research suggests harsh physical punishment has a stronger effect on children’s behaviour problems than vice versa

• ineffective discipline is often evident in the pattern of a troubled family interaction

  • ex. the aggression of children may be reinforced by parents who give into the demands/fit of temper, which results in parents and children behaving harshly with one another

• the relation between punitive parenting and children’s aggression can have a genetic component

  • parents whose genes predispose them to aggressive or punitive parenting will pass those genes to their children which means this parenting can be linked to antisocial and aggressive behaviour in children through genes and a conflictual home environment (passive gene-environment correlation)

Poor parental monitoring

• parental monitoring may be important as it reduces the likelihood that older children and adolescents will associate with deviant, antisocial peers

• once adolescents begin engaging in unfavourable behaviours, they become harder to monitor, and parents of aggressive youth find that monitoring can lead to high conflict with children and are forced to back off

Parental conflict

• children who are frequently exposed to verbal and physical violence between their parents tend to be more antisocial and aggressive than other children

• one reason is that parents model aggressive behaviour for children and another is that children whos mothers are physically abused tend to believe violence is an acceptable and even natural part of family interactions

• embattled spouses also tend to be less skilled and responsive as well as more hostile and controlling in their parenting, which can increase their children’s aggressive tendencies (cycle)

  • this happens even with an adopted child, so this cannot be solely because of genes

Socioeconomic status and children’s antisocial behaviour

• children from low-income families tend to be more antisocial and aggressive than children from high or middle-income homes

• this could be because of the greater number of stressors experienced by children in poor families, like family stress and neighbourhood violence

  • because of the stress they face, parents in poverty are more likely to be rejecting and low in warmth, use harsh discipline, and be lax in supervision/monitoring

• children in low-income families tend to live in low-income neighbourhoods which have more violence and crime, and they also attend low-income schools which do not have the proper resources and also have high violence

  • these neighbourhoods lack appropriate mentors, job opportunities, and constructive activities that engage children and youth and lead them away from antisocial behaviour

Peer Influences on Aggression and Antisocial Behaviour

• aggressive children tend to socialize with other aggressive children and become more deliquent if their close friends are aggressive

• members of the larger peer group with whom older children socialize with may influence aggression even more than close friends

• it appears children’s susceptibility to peer pressure to become involved in antisocial behaviour increases in the elementary school yeras, peaks at about 8th to 9th grade, and declines after

• peer approval of relational aggression increases in middle school, and students in peer groups that are supportive of relational aggression become increasingly aggressive

  • exception ex. mexican american immigrant youth who are more tied ot traditional values are less susceptible to peer pressure toward antisocial behaviour than those who are less traditional

Biology and Socialization: Their Joint Influence on Children’s Antisocial Behaviour

• it is often a combination of genetic and environmental factors that predict children’s antisocial, aggressive behaviour and that some children are more sensitive to the quality of parenting than others

• children with certain gene variants related to serotonin or dopamine appear to be more responsive to their environment than children with different variants

• gene variants can be related to higher risk for aggression in adverse situations like maltreatment and divorce but are not related to aggression in the absence of the adverse conditions

Interventions for Aggressive and Antisocial Children

• children with these problem behaviours can be treated with individual psychotherapy or a combination of psychotherapy and drug therapy

  • it is useful and even necessary to involve parents as interventions that teach parents how to manage their own behaviour when interacting with children can reduce their aggression and antisocial behaviour

• community-based programs that aim to reduce antisocial behaviour by increasing positive behaviour exist, and they do this through an approach called positive youth development

  • schools can also be settings for this interventions

• The Fast Track program is designed to promote understanding and communication of emotions, positive social behaviour, self-control, and social problem solving, and children with the most serious problems participated in an intensive intervention

• positive youth development is an approach to youth intervention that focuses on developing and nurturing strengths and assets rather than on correcting weaknesses and deficits

  • it emphasizes competence, confidence, connection, character, caring, and compassion.

  • it utilizes service learning which is a strategy that integrates school-based instruction with community involvement in order to promote civic responsibility and enhance learning

    • participation in service learning can increase student’s empathy, awareness of larger social issues, ability to participate in a cooperative activity, and capacity for making responsible decisions.