Chapter 15: Moral Development and Aggression

• Morality: guilding principle or ideal that distiguish between right and wrong
• Moral foundation theory:

  • Care
  • fairness
  • Loyalty
  • Authority
  • Purity
• Turiel Social Domain theory:

  Children and adults operate on different sets of rules

  • moral rules (no one is hurt)
  • social conventional rules (organized)
• Morality in young Children:

  Empathy - experience the same emotion as another

  Sympathy - feel sorrow or concern for another

  Sympathic distress - feeling of Sympathy that happens when we experience the emotions of distress in another

  Self-oriented distress: personal discomfort when we empathize with others
• Social Preferences for helpfulness: 6-12 month old want to help
• Prosocial helping:

  14-18 month old todders are eager to help out, without being asked to do so, and with intrinsic motivation
• Cultural influences:

  • less industrial societies tend to have more altruistic kiddos
  • the group vs. me (collective vs individualistic)
• Internalization: taking others standards as your own
• Positive reinforcements:

  Children begin to form conscience when they are securely attached
• Mutually responsive relationship: relatioship between a child and a parent where both parties are responsive for each others needs and goals
• Moral Behaviour encourages us to not act antisocially
• Rule breaking behaviours can be rewarding
• Committed compliance: when a child want to cooperate with a parent who has been willing to cooperate
• Situational compliance: compliance based on control of the parent of the childs conduct
• Punishment must be corralated really well
• Punishment leads to immediate compliance, but impedes moral rules
• Punishment is best when tied to reason
• Piaget theory of Moral Development:

  • premortal Period (preschool)
  • Heteronomous Morality (5-10)
  • Autonomous Morality (10-11)
• The autonomous stage understands that rules can be violated based on human need
• The Heteronomous stage understands rules to be unalterable and sacred
• Kohlberg's Theory:

  1. Punishment and Obedience
  2. Naive hedonism
  3. "fitting in" orientation
  4. Social Order maintaining
  5. Social Contract
  6. Morality of Individual Principle
• Stage one of Kohlberg's Theory is

  1. Punishment and Obedience (Not getting in trouble with authority)
  2. Naive Hedonism (Helping others so they might help you)
• Stage two of Kohlberg's theory:

  3. "fitting in" stage (what will others say about me)

  4. Social Order maintaining (following the agreed rules to maintain order)
• Stage 3 of Kohlberg's Theory:

  5. Social contract (expressing the needs of the majority)

  6. Morality of Individual (based on their own conscious and abstract)
• Empircal support for Kohlberg's theory:

  • levels and stages are univercial
  • longitudinal evidance
  • Cognitive prerequisits are essential
  • social experience hypothosis
• Criticism of Kohlberg:

  • gender bias
  • link to moral conduct
  • Underestimates young kids
• Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement: reframe coginative behavour as being acceptable
• Agressive behaviours:

  Reactive: goal is to harm

  proactive: goal is to get something, and harm is just the result

  Relational: acts like exclusion, rumour and snubbing to damage someones feelings
• In Infancy: reactive agression is most common
• In Childhood: Agression becomes more verbal
• Boys are more overtly agressive
• Girls are more relationally agressive
• overt agression, slows with age, but covert agression, increases with age
• Sex differences in Agressive behaviours

  • stable attribution for both male and female
  • boys are physically
  • Antisocial conduct increases with boy in adolescents
  • girls are Verbally
  • relationship agression increases in girls in adolescents
• Kenneth Dodge:

  children with disruptive Behaviour interpret social information as more agressive, hence will be agressive
• Six stages of social informations processing:

  1. encoding social cues (seeing the cue)
  2. interprets social cues (theory of mind)
  3. Formulate social cues (clarify goal)
  4. generate problem-solving stratgies
  5. evaluates the likely effective and selects a responce
  6. Enacts a responce
  7. peer evealutaion and responce

  all of these are influences by the child's mental state
• Coercive home environments:

  • a family member passive-aggressively "poke" each other which leads to more agressive children
• Methods of controlling agression

  • non-agressive enviroments
  • Relying on time outs
  • Implementing social cognitive rationals