Morality, Aggression, Altruism

Morality, Aggression, Altruism

MORALITY

– A set of principles or ideals that help the individual to distinguish right from wrong, to act on this distinction and to feel pride in virtuous conduct and guilt for conduct that violates one’s standards.

Components of Morality: • 1. Affective (emotional) • 2. Cognitive (moral reasoning) • 3. Behavioral (actions)

1. Affective • Freud’s theory of oedipal morality

• According to Freud's theory of oedipal morality, children internalize the moral standards of the same sex parent during the phallic stage as they resolve their Oedipus or Electra complexes and form a conscience or superego. • \

Newer ideas about the early development of the conscience • The newer research finds that the conscience forms earlier in toddler hood in the context of a warm, MUTUALLY RESPONSIVE RELATIONSHIP.

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Toddlers are likely to display COMMITED COMPLIANCE- an orientation in which they are: 1. Highly motivated to embrace the parents agenda and to comply with her rules and requests 2. Sensitive to a parents emotional signals indicating whether they have done right or wrong 3. Beginning to internalize those parental reactions to their triumphs and transgressions.

2. Cognitive • Jean Piaget’s Cognitive Theory of Moral Development includes a premoral period and two moral substages. • Kohlberg’s Cognitive Theory of Moral Development

Premoral Period • The first 5 yrs. of life, when children are said to have little respect for or awareness of rules.

Heteronomous Morality • 1st stage of moral dev’t. in which the children view the rules of authority figures as sacred and unalterable.

Expiatory punishments - punishment for its own sake with no concern for its relation in the nature of the forbidden act. Immanent justice - the notion that unacceptable conduct will invariably be punished and that justice is ever present in the world.

Autonomous Morality • 2nd stage of moral dev’t. in which children realize that rules are arbitrary agreements that can be challenged and changed with the consent of the people they govern.

• Kohlberg’s Cognitive Theory of Moral Development

3. Behavioral • Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel’s Social Learning Theory of Moral Dev’t. • They claim that moral behaviors are learned through : • Reinforcement • Punishment • Observational learning / Social model influences

• Reinforcement *praise • Punishment *inhibitory control – an ability to display acceptable conduct by resisting the temptation to commit a forbidden act.

• Ross Parke (1977) used the forbidden toy paradigm to study the effects of punishment on children’s resistance to temptation. • Cognitive rationale – one that informs a child why the prohibited act is wrong and why she should feel guilty or shameful about repeating it.

• Social Modeling Influences – (Joan Grusec & associates) • - following a rule-following model can be particularly effective at inspiring children to behave in kind if the model clearly verbalizes that he is ff a rule and states a rationale for not committing a deviant act.

Who Raises Children Who Are Morally Mature? • Martin Hoffman (1970) reviewed the childrearing literature • 3 major approaches: • Love withdrawal (withholding attention) • Power assertion (use of superior power) • Induction (using rationale)

Why is inductive reasoning effective? 1. It provides children with cognitive standards to evaluate their conduct. 2. It helps children to sympathize with others. 3. Parents who use inductive discipline are likely to explain to the child (1)what s/he should have done when tempted to violate a prohibition and (2) what s/he can now do to make up for a transgression.

Aggression

Two types of aggression • Hostile aggression • Instrumental aggression

HOSTILE AGGRESSION • Aggressive acts for which the perpetrator's major goal is to harm or injure a victims.

INSTRUMENTAL AGGRESSION • Aggressive acts for which the perpetrator’s major goal is to gain access to objects, space or privileges. • Instrumental aggression appears by the end of the first year as infants have conflicts over toys and other possessions.

What is conflict? • Circumstances in which two or more persons have incompatible needs, desires, or goals.

• During early childhood, aggression becomes less physical and increasingly verbal and somewhat less instrumental and increasingly retaliatory. • What is retaliatory? • Aggressive acts elicited by real or imagined provocation.

Two kinds of highly aggressive children: • Proactive aggressors • Reactive aggressors

Proactive aggressors • Highly aggressive children who find aggressive acts easy to perform and who rely on heavily on aggression as means of solving social problems or achieving other personal objectives.

Reactive aggressors • Children who display high levels of hostile, retaliatory aggression because they overattribute hostile intents to others and can’t control their anger long enough to seek non aggressive solutions to social problems.

Dodge’s social information processing Theory of aggression • Kenneth Dodge has formulated a social information processing model that seeks to explain how children come to favor aggressive or non aggressive solutions to social problems.

Bullying and victimization – Passive victims of aggression Socially withdrawn, anxious children with low self-esteem whom bullies torment, even though they appear to have done little to trigger such abuse. Most victims of bullies are Passive victims whom bullies find easy to dominate.

• Provocative victims of aggression • Restless, hot tempered and oppositional children who are victimized because they often irritate their peers. Provocative victims have often physically abused or otherwise victimized at home.

Popularity and aggression • Popularity – A social construction by children, with popular children being well-known and accepted by other children and having high status attributes such as attractiveness, athleticism and desirable possessions.

Families as social system • Coercive home environment – A home in which family members often annoy one another and use aggressive or otherwise antisocial tactics as a method of coping with these aversive experience.

• Negative reinforcement • any stimulus whose removal or termination as the consequence of an art will increase the probability.

• Negative reinforcement was important in maintaining these coercive interactions: • When one family member makes life unpleasant for another, the second learns to yell, scream, tease or hit because these actions often force the antagonist to stop.

Methods of controlling aggression in young children 1. Creating non aggressive environments 2. Eliminating the payoffs for aggression 3. Social cognitive intervention

ALTRUISM

TURNING POINTS BIRTH – 6MOS

•Responds positively to others •Participates in social games •Reacts emotionally to others’ distress

6-12 MOS

•Takes an active role in social games •Exhibits sharing behaviors •Displays affection to familiar persons

12-24 MOS

•Refines ability to point with index finger •Complies with simple requests •Shows knowledge of caregiving skills •Comfort people in distress •Participates in adult’s work, household tasks •Shows and gives toys to others

24-36 MOS

•Draw person’s attention to objects with words as well as gestures •Exhibits increasingly planned caregiving and helping behaviors •Verbally expresses own intentions to help & knowledge of tasks •Gives helpful verbal advice •Tries to protect others

3 – ABOUT 7 YEARS

•Is hedonistically motivated to perform prosocial acts

3-11 YEARS

•Recognizes others’ needs even when they conflict with own

6-17 YEARS

•Justifies prosocial / nonprosocial behavior by reference to stereotypical notions of good and bad and considerations of approval and acceptance from others

10-17 YEARS

•Empathizes with others and feels pride or guilt about consequences of own actions

14-17 YEARS

•May justify helping or not helping by internalized values and by concern with rights and dignity of others •May believe in individual and social obligations, the equality of all individuals, and may base self-respect on living up to own values and accepted norms

• Individual variations are due to temperamental variations. • Affective explanations – discipline which focuses a child’s attention on the harm or distress that his / her conduct has caused others.

Determinants of Prosocial Development

1. Prosocial Moral reasoning - the thinking that people display when deciding whether to help, share with, or comfort others when these actions could prove costly to themselves.

2. Empathy - feelings of sympathy or compassion that may be elicited when we experience the emotions of a distressed other.

• Biological influences • Environmental influences • TV and Prosocial behavior • Cross-Cultural Perspective

• Influence of Cognitive Development

Nancy Eisenberg & colleague’ model of the development of prosocial reasoning about prosocial dilemmas: Level Age Group Orientation Modes of Prosocial Reasoning

1

Pre-Schoolers & Elementary

Hedonistic

Child is concerned w/ self-oriented consequences rather than moral considerations.

2

Pre-Schoolers & Elementary

Recognition of needs of others

Child expresses concern for the physical, material, & psychological needs of others even if these needs conflict w/ her own.

3

Elementary & High Seeking Other’s School Approval &

Child uses stereotyped images of good & bad persons

Acceptance

4

Older Elementary & High School Minority of High School students

5

(a) Empathic (b) Transitional

Child’s judgments include evidence of sympathetic responding, self-reflective role taking Child’s justifications for helping or not involve internalized values, norms, duties

Only a small Strongly internalized Child’s justifications for helping or not are minority of high based on internalized values, the desire ti school students and maintain individual & societal obligations virtually no elementary school