Transcript SR6e Chapter 13

CHAPTER 13
SOCIAL COGNITION AND MORAL
DEVELOPMENT
Learning Objectives
• What is a theory of mind?
• What are the developmental milestones
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associated with the acquisition of a theory of
mind?
What developmental changes occur in the
acquiring of a theory of mind and what factors
affect its emergence?
Social Cognition
• Social cognition is thinking about the
•
perceptions, thoughts, emotions, motives,
and behaviors of self, other people, groups,
and social systems
A theory of mind is the understanding that
people have mental states such as desires,
beliefs, and intentions and that these mental
states guide their behaviors
– Researchers used the false belief task to
assess children’s development of a theory
of mind
Caption: The false
belief task involving
Sally and
Anne. The child who
has developed a
theory of mind should
say that Sally will
look in the basket
based on her false
belief that the marble is
there. The child
who fails this false
belief task says that
Sally will look in the box
(where the child
knows the marble has
been moved).
Social Cognition
• In the false belief task, children are asked to
respond to the following scenario: “A girl
named Sally puts her marble in her basket
and leaves the room. While she is gone,
Anne moves the marble to her box. Sally
returns to the room. Where will Sally look for
her marble?”
Social Cognition
• Children who pass the false belief task and
show evidence of having a theory of mind to
explain human behavior say that Sally will
look for her marble in the basket (where she
falsely believes it to be) rather than in the box
(where it was moved without her knowledge)
– Children who have a theory of mind
believe that Sally’s behavior will be guided
by her false belief about the marble’s
location; they are able to set aside their
own knowledge of where the marble
ended up after Anne moved it
Social Cognition –
Developing a Theory of Mind
•
Certain abilities are considered important early
signs of a theory of mind
– An infant’s ability to get involved in bouts of
joint attention (by pointing at an object and
then looking toward a companion to
encourage the other to look at the object, too)
– In their first months of life, infants come to
understand, partly from their own actions on
the world, that other people have intentions,
set goals, and act to achieve them
Social Cognition –
Developing a Theory of Mind
•
Certain abilities are considered important early
signs of a theory of mind (continued)
– Between 1 and 2 years, when infants engage
in their first simple pretend play, they show a
primitive understanding of the difference
between pretense (a kind of false belief) and
reality
– Imitation of other people in the first year of life
reveals an ability to mentally represent their
actions and possibly the goals or intentions
behind them
Social Cognition –
Developing a Theory of Mind
– Emotional understanding (for example,
comforting a playmate who is crying)
reflects an understanding that other
people have emotions and that these
emotions can be influenced for good or
bad
Social Cognition –
Developing a Theory of Mind
•
Wellman (1990) theorized that children’s
theories of mind develop in two phases
– Around age 2, children develop a desire
psychology in which they explain their
behavior and that of others in terms of wants
or desires
– By age 4, children progress to a belief-desire
psychology and understand that people do
what they do because they desire certain
things and because they believe that certain
actions can help them fulfill their desires
Social Cognition –
Developing a Theory of Mind
•
What are the roles of nature and nurture in the
development of a theory of mind?
– In support of the role of nature
• Evolutionary theorists argue that having a
theory of mind was adaptive for the evolution
of the human species
• Development of a theory of mind requires a
certain level of biological maturation, especially
neurological and cognitive development
• Researchers believe that mirror neurons –
neurons that are activated both when we
perform an action and when we observe
someone else perform the same action – are
involved in theory-of-mind understandings
Social Cognition –
Developing a Theory of Mind
•
What are the roles of nature and nurture in the
development of a theory of mind?
– In support of the role of nurture, certain factors influence
children’s development of a theory of mind
• Social interaction involving language
• Parental sensitivity to children’s needs and
perspectives and the formation of secure
attachments
– Especially important is parental “mindmindedness,” which involves talking in elaborated
and appropriate ways about children’s mental
states
• Cultural perspectives on beliefs and thoughts
Social Cognition –
Developing a Theory of Mind
•
Formulating a theory of mind has consequences for
development
– Children who have mastered theory-of-mind tasks
generally tend to have more advanced social skills
and better social adjustment than those who have
not
• They understand that others’ emotional
responses might differ from their own, and they
can think more maturely about moral issues
– Theory-of-mind skills also can be used for
inappropriate purposes: bullies and good liars often
are adept at “mind reading”
Social Cognition –
Describing and Evaluating Other People
• Children younger than 7 or 8 describe
themselves and others in terms of physical
appearance, possessions, and activities
• Around age 7 or 8, children’s descriptions of
people show that they are beginning to think
about people in terms of enduring
psychological traits (“nice,” “funny,” “bossy”)
Social Cognition –
Describing and Evaluating Other People
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As children reach age 11 or 12, they make more
use of psychological traits to explain why people
behave as they do (“. . . because he is mean”)
Compared to children, adolescents describe
others in psychological terms – traits, interests,
values, and feelings
– Adolescents can incorporate seeming
inconsistencies into their understanding of
others
• “She brags but it is because she is insecure
and wants to hide her insecurities”
Learning Objectives
• How do person perception and role-taking
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skills develop?
Why are these skills important?
How do they change over the lifespan?
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
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An important aspect of social cognitive
development involves outgrowing childhood
egocentrism and developing social perspectivetaking
– The ability to adopt another person’s
perspective and understand her thoughts and
feelings in relation to your own
Social perspective-taking skills are essential in
thinking about moral issues from different points of
view, predicting the consequences of a person’s
actions for others, and empathizing with others
•
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
Selman (1976) described the development of
social perspective-taking abilities in stages
– Because children 3 to 6 years old are
egocentric; tend to assume that others share
their point of view
– By age 8 to 10, as concrete-operational
cognitive abilities solidify, children appreciate
that two people can have different points of
view even if they have access to the same
information
• Children are able to think about their own
thoughts and about the thoughts of another
person, and they realize that their
companions can do the same
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
•
Selman (1976) described the development of
social perspective-taking abilities in stages
(continued)
– By age 12, adolescents who have reached the
formal-operational stage of cognitive
development become capable of mentally
juggling multiple perspectives
• Adolescents can keep in mind
simultaneously their own perspective, that of
another person, and that of an abstract
“generalized other,” or the broader social
group
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
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Advances in social cognition are more likely if
parents are good models of social perspective
taking, consider their children’s feelings and
thoughts, and rely on explanation rather than
punishment in disciplining their children
Advanced social perspective-taking skills help
make children more sensitive and desirable
companions
– Children with advanced social perspectivetaking skills are more likely than age-mates
with less advanced skills to be sociable and
popular and to enjoy close relationships with
peers
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
• The social-cognitive skills of adults may
continue to improve after adolescence
– Researchers found that adults, especially
those of middle age, were better able than
adolescents to see both sides of an issue
and to integrate multiple perspectives into a
workable solution
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
• Some researchers have detected deficiencies
in the social-cognitive skills of older adults
– Declines in basic cognitive functions such
as working memory and processing speed
can take a toll on social-cognitive
performance
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
•
Social cognitive skills also may be well-maintained
late in life
– Hess and colleagues (2005) found that middleaged and elderly adults were more adept than
young adults at reading a person’s behavior to
infer whether he possessed traits such as
honesty or intelligence
• Elderly adults perform as well as young
and/or middle-aged adults on many socialcognitive tasks, probably because they have
accumulated expertise about the world of
people
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
•
Reasons that social-cognitive skills may be wellmaintained late in life included the following
– The areas of the cortex that support social
cognition and emotional understanding age
more slowly than the areas that support
nonsocial cognition
– It has been observed that in completing socialcognitive tasks, older adults tend to rely on
cognitive strategies such as simple rules of
thumb and strongly-held beliefs about people
– Social-cognitive skills may hold up well,
especially in “real life” people-reading tasks,
because they are used – exercised – every day
Social Cognition –
Social Perspective-Taking
•
Possibly the most important research finding on
social-cognitive development in adulthood is that
older adults differ greatly in their social cognitive
abilities
– Those who have the sharpest social-cognitive
skills tend to be socially active and involved in
meaningful social roles such as spouse,
grandparent, church member, and worker
– It is mainly when elderly people become
socially isolated or inactive that their social
cognitive skills become rusty
Learning Objectives
• What is morality?
• What are the three basic components of
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morality?
How did Piaget and Kohlberg explain the
development of moral reasoning?
What are the important characteristics of
each stage of Piaget’s theory?
What are the important characteristics of
each level and stage of Kohlberg’s theory?
Perspectives on Moral Development
•
Developmental scientists have focused on three
basic components of morality
– The affective, or emotional, component
consists of the feelings (guilt, concern for
others’ feelings, and so on) that surround right
or wrong actions and that motivate moral
thoughts and actions
– The cognitive component centers on how we
conceptualize right and wrong and make
decisions about how to behave
– The behavioral component reflects how we
behave when, for example, we experience the
temptation to cheat or are called upon to help a
needy person
Perspectives on Moral Development
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Moral affect – positive and negative emotions
related to matters of right and wrong – can
motivate behavior
– Negative emotions (shame, guilt) can keep us
from doing what we know is wrong
– Positive emotions (pride, self-satisfaction) can
occur when we do the right thing
Empathy – the vicarious experiencing of another
person’s feelings – is an emotional process that is
important in moral development
Empathy can motivate prosocial behavior –
positive social acts, such as helping or sharing,
that reflect concern for the welfare of others
Perspectives on Moral Development
• Although aspects of Freud’s theory of moral
development are not supported,
researchers agree about his main themes
– Moral emotions are an important part of
morality and motivate of moral behavior
– Early relationships with parents
contribute to moral development
– Children must internalize moral
standards if they are to behave morally
even when no authority figure is present
to detect and punish their misbehavior
Perspectives on Moral Development
• Cognitive developmental theorists study
morality by looking at the development of
moral reasoning – the thinking process
involved in deciding whether an act is right or
wrong
• Moral reasoning is believed to progress
through an invariant sequence – a fixed and
universal order of stages, each of which
represents a consistent way of thinking about
moral issues that is different from the stage
preceding or following it
Perspectives on Moral Development
•
Piaget’s theory of moral development includes three
aspects – the premoral period, heteronomous morality,
and autonomous morality
– Premoral period
• During the preschool years, children show little
awareness or understanding of rules and cannot be
considered moral beings
– Heteronomous morality
• Children 6 to 10 years old take rules seriously,
believing that they are handed down by parents and
other authority figures and are sacred and
unalterable
• They judge rule violations as wrong based on the
extent of damage done, not paying much attention
to whether the violator had good or bad intentions
Perspectives on Moral Development
• Piaget’s theory of moral development
(continued)
– Autonomous morality
• At age 10 or 11, most children enter a final
stage of moral development in which they
begin to appreciate that rules are
agreements between individuals –
agreements that can be changed through
a consensus of those individuals
• In judging actions, they pay more attention
to whether the person’s intentions were
good or bad than to the consequences of
the act
Perspectives on Moral Development
• Lawrence Kohlberg concluded that moral
growth progresses through a universal and
invariant sequence of three broad moral levels,
each of which is composed of two distinct
stages
– Each stage grows out of the preceding stage
and represents a more complex way of
thinking about moral issues
Perspectives on Moral Development
•
Summary of Kohlberg’s theory
– Level 1: preconventional morality
• Stage 1: punishment-and-obedience orientation
• Stage 2: instrumental hedonism
– Level 2: conventional morality
• Stage 3: “good boy” or “good girl” morality
• Stage 4: authority and social order-maintaining
morality
– Level 3: postconventional morality
• Stage 5: morality of contract, individual rights, and
democratically accepted law
• Stage 6: morality of individual principles of
conscience
Perspectives on Moral Development
•
Influences on moral thinking
– Freud emphasized the role of parents
– Piaget and Kohlberg believed that the two main influences on
moral development are cognitive growth and social interactions
with equals
• Cognitive growth
– At the conventional level, the ability to take other
people’s perspectives is required
– At the postconventional level, formal-operational
thinking is required
• Social interactions with equals
– Negotiations to work out differences in perspectives
– Advanced schooling
– Participation in a complex, diverse, democratic society
Learning Objectives
• How do social-learning theorists explain
•
moral behavior?
According to evolutionary theory, what are
the functions of morality?
Moral Behavior: Social-Learning Theory
• Social-learning theorists have focused on the
behavioral component of morality – what we
actually do when faced with temptation or
with an opportunity to behave prosocially
– According to social-learning theory, moral
behavior is learned in the same way that
other social behaviors are learned:
through observational learning and
reinforcement and punishment principles
Moral Behavior: Social-Learning Theory
• Social-learning theorists believe moral
behavior is believed to be strongly influenced
by situational
– Due to situational influences, what we do
(moral performance) is not always
reflective of our internalized values and
standards (moral competence)
Moral Behavior: Social-Learning Theory
• Bandura emphasized that moral cognition is
linked to moral action through self-regulatory
mechanisms that involve
– Monitoring and evaluating our actions
– Disapproving of ourselves when we
contemplate doing wrong
– Approving of ourselves when we behave
responsibly or humanely
Moral Behavior: Social-Learning Theory
• Bandura suggested that mechanisms of
moral disengagement allow us to avoid
condemning ourselves when we engage in
immoral behavior even though we know right
from wrong
– Individuals who have perfected moral
disengagement tend to be the ones who
engage in the most antisocial and
unethical behaviors
Moral Behavior: Functions of Morality –
Evolutionary Theory
• Evolutionary theorists focus on how moral
thought, emotion, and behavior may have
helped humans adapt to their environments
over the course of evolution
– Prosocial behaviors (cooperation, altruism)
and mechanisms for controlling and
inhibiting harmful behaviors may have
evolved because they enhanced survival
Moral Behavior: Functions of Morality –
Evolutionary Theory
• Evolutionary theorists argue that humans
have an evolved genetic makeup that
predisposes them not only to behave
antisocially but also to empathize with their
fellow humans and to behave prosocially and
morally
Learning Objectives
• How can parents provide their infants and
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children with moral socialization?
What child characteristics determine how
morally trainable a child is likely to be?
How do current researchers evaluate Piaget’s
and Kohlberg’s views on infants’ and
children’s moral reasoning?
The Infant – Early Moral Training
• Infants are predisposed to be empathic,
prosocial beings and learn many important
moral lessons during their first 2 years of life
– Infants begin to learn that their actions
have consequences, to associate negative
emotions with violating rules, and to exert
self-control when they are tempted to
violate rules
The Infant – Early Moral Training
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According to Kochanska and colleagues (2009),
moral socialization is based upon
– A secure parent-infant attachment
– Development of a mutually responsive orientation
• A close, emotionally positive, and cooperative
relationship in which child and caregiver care
about each other and are sensitive to each
other’s needs
Parents also can foster early moral development by
discussing their toddlers’ behavior in an open way,
expressing their feelings, and evaluating their
children’s acts as good or bad
The Infant – Empathy and Prosocial Behavior
•
There is evidence that empathy and prosocial
behavior are part of human evolutionary heritage
– Newborns display a primitive form of empathy
when they are distressed by the cries of other
newborns
– From the ages of 1 to 2, infants develop a form
of empathy that motivates helping, such as
when a toddler tries to comfort someone in
distress
– Prosocial behaviors (helping, sharing,
comforting) become increasingly common from
age 1 to age 2
The Child
• Both Piaget and Kohlberg underestimated
children’s abilities to engage in moral
reasoning
– Nelson’s (1980) study showed that young
children can base their moral judgments
on both a person’s intentions and the
consequences of his act
The Child – Understanding Rules
•
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Turiel (1978, 1983, 2006) observed that children
distinguish between different kinds of rules
– Moral rules: standards that focus on the welfare and
basic rights of individuals
• Rules against hitting, stealing, lying, and
otherwise harming others or violating their rights
– Social-conventional rules: standards determined by
social consensus that tell us what is appropriate in
particular social settings
• Rules of social etiquette, including the rules of
games and school rules for behavior
From their preschool years, children understand that
moral rules are more compelling and unalterable than
social-conventional rules
The Child – Applying Theory of Mind
• Once they develop a theory of mind,
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children’s moral thinking becomes more
sophisticated
– Preschoolers who pass theory-of-mind
tasks are able to distinguish between lying
(deliberately promoting a false belief) and
simply having one’s facts wrong
Theory-of-mind skills also help young children
understand people’s emotional reactions to
people’s behavior, an important consideration
in judging right and wrong
The Child – Moral Socialization
•
Hoffman (2000) compared childrearing
approaches that foster moral behavior and moral
thought and affect
– Love withdrawal – withholding attention,
affection, or approval after a child misbehaves
(creating anxiety by threatening a loss of
reinforcement from parents)
– Power assertion – using power to threaten,
chastise, administer spankings, take away
privileges (using punishment)
– Induction – explaining to a child why the
behavior is wrong and should be changed by
emphasizing how it affects other people
The Child – Moral Socialization
• Hoffman (2000) compared childrearing
approaches that foster moral behavior and
moral thought and affect (continued)
– Induction is more often positively
associated with children’s moral maturity
than either love withdrawal or power
assertion
• In Hoffman’s view, induction works well
because it breeds empathy
The Child – Moral Socialization
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Making a child worry that his parents’ love can be
withdrawn at anytime usually is not effective
The use of power assertion is more often associated
with moral immaturity than with moral maturity
– At the extreme, children whose parents are
physically abusive feel less guilt and engage in
more immoral behaviors such as stealing than
other children
– It is generally ineffective to use even milder power
tactics such as physical restraint and commands to
keep young children from engaging in prohibited
acts
However, Hoffman (2000) concluded that mild power
assertion tactics such as a forceful “No,” a reprimand,
or the removal of privileges can be useful occasionally
The Child – Moral Socialization
• Summary of Hoffman’s view of childrearing
approaches that foster moral development
•
– “a blend of frequent inductions, occasional
power assertions, and a lot of affection” (2000,
p. 23)
Effective parents use proactive parenting
strategies
– Tactics designed to prevent misbehavior and
reduce the need for correction or discipline
(e.g., distraction for younger children and
explicit teaching of values for older children)
The Child – Moral Socialization
• A child’s temperament is an important
•
determinant of how morally trainable she is
and what motivates her moral behavior
Kochanska and colleagues found that
children are easiest to socialize if
– They are by temperament fearful or
inhibited (likely to experience guilt and
distress)
– They are capable of effortful control, and
therefore are able to inhibit their urges to
engage in wrongdoing
Learning Objectives
• What developmental trends emerge in moral
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reasoning during adolescence?
What are the forms and the origins of
antisocial behavior in adolescence?
How have scholars evaluated Kohlberg’s
theory of moral reasoning?
What roles do religion and spirituality play in
the lives of adults?
The Adolescent –
Changes in Moral Reasoning
•
The main developmental trend in moral reasoning
during adolescence is a shift from
preconventional to conventional reasoning
– During this period, most individuals begin to
express a genuine concern with living up to the
moral standards that parents and other
authorities have taught them and ensuring that
laws designed to make human relations just
and fair are taken seriously and maintained
– Postconventional reasoning does not emerge
until adulthood, if it emerges at all
Caption: Average percentage of moral reasoning at each
of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages for males from age 10 to
36
The Adolescent –
Antisocial Behavior
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In most societies, crime rates peak during
adolescence
Most severely antisocial adults begin their antisocial
careers in childhood and continue into adolescence
– Engage in juvenile delinquency
• Law-breaking by a minor
– May have a psychiatric diagnosis of conduct
disorder that becomes a diagnosis of antisocial
personality disorder as an adult
• Conduct disorder: a persistent pattern of
violating the rights of others or age-appropriate
societal norms through such behaviors as
fighting, bullying, and cruelty
The Adolescent –
Antisocial Behavior
• Two subgroups of antisocial youths
– Early-onset group – recognizable in
childhood through acts such as torturing
animals and hitting other children and is
persistently antisocial across the lifespan
– Late-onset – a larger group that behaves
antisocially mainly during adolescence,
partly in response to peer pressures
(outgrows this behavior in adulthood)
The Adolescent –
Antisocial Behavior
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The origins of antisocial conduct
– Moral reasoning
• Juvenile delinquents are likely than nondelinquents
to rely on preconventional moral reasoning (lack a
well-developed sense of right and wrong)
– Moral emotions
• Aggressive or conduct disordered adolescents are
less likely than other adolescents to show empathy
and concern for others in distress, and they often
feel little guilt and remorse about their acts
– Social information processing
• Aggressive or conduct disordered adolescents
process social information differently than other
adolescents do
– Dodge’s social information-processing model
•
The Adolescent –
Antisocial Behavior
Dodge and his colleagues formulated a social informationprocessing model to explain aggressive behavior by an
individual who is provoked (by being tripped)
– Encoding of cues: taking in information
– Interpretation of cues: making sense of this information
and deciding what caused the other person’s behavior
– Clarification of goals: deciding what to achieve in the
situation
– Response search: thinking of possible actions to
achieve the goal
– Response decision: weighing the pros and cons of
these alternative actions
– Behavioral enactment: doing something
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
• Highly aggressive youths show deficient or
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biased information processing at every step
Many aggressive youths act impulsively with an
automatic response based on their past
experiences
They are easily angered and quickly attribute
hostile intent to whoever harms them
Severely violent youths have often experienced
abandonment, neglect, abuse, and bullying
Their experiences may have given them a basis
to view the world as a hostile place and to feel
little concern for others
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
•
Patterson and colleagues found that highly
antisocial children and adolescents often grow up
in coercive family environments
– Family members engage in power struggles to
control each other through negative, coercive
tactics
• Parents are negatively reinforced when their
threatening, yelling, and hitting temporarily
stops their children’s misbehavior
• Children are negatively reinforced when their
difficult behavior (ignoring requests, whining,
temper tantrums) successfully stops their
parents’ behavior
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
• According to Patterson and colleagues, the
coercive family environment sets in motion the
next steps in the making of an antisocial
adolescent
– The aggressive, unpleasant child performs
poorly in school and is rejected by other
children
– He then becomes involved in a peer group
made up of other low-achieving, antisocial,
and unpopular youths, who positively
reinforce one another’s delinquency
Caption: Gerald Patterson’s model of the development of antisocial
behavior starts with poor discipline and coercive cycles of family
influence
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
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Severe antisocial behavior is the product of a
complex interplay between genetic predisposition
and social learning experiences
– From an evolutionary perspective, male
aggression may have evolved to enable
successful competition for mates and genetic
contribution to the next generation
– Some individuals (female and male) are
genetically predisposed to have difficult, irritable
temperaments, impulsive tendencies, and other
response tendencies and personality traits that
contribute to aggressive, delinquent, and
criminal behavior
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
– Through the mechanism of gene-environment
interaction, children with certain genetic
predispositions may become antisocial if they
also grow up in a dysfunctional family and
receive poor parenting or are physically abused
– According to Dodge (2009),
• Children who have a variant of the
monoamine oxidase (MAOA) gene (a gene on
the X chromosome that normally contributes
to an ability to control our tempers) that
results in low MAOA activity
• If they are abused or mistreated may attribute
hostile intentions to others
• Cannot control their anger and lash out
impulsively
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
•
Through the mechanism of gene-environment
correlation, children who inherit a genetic predisposition
to become aggressive may actually evoke the coercive
parenting that fosters aggression
– This evocative gene-environment correlation effect is
evident even when aggression-prone children grow
up with adoptive parents rather than with their
biological parents because these children bring out
negativity in their adoptive parents
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
– Other risk factors and protective factors can
influence the outcome for a child who is
genetically predisposed to be aggressive
• Prenatal environment
• Complications during delivery
• Cultural contexts
• Subcultural and neighborhood factors
• School environment
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
• Dodge and his colleagues (2003) have
attempted to integrate the influences on
antisocial behavior into a biopsychosocial
model of aggression that recognizes the
contributions of biological predisposition,
individual psychology, and social or contextual
factors
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
•
Dodge and his colleagues (2008) also proposed a
“dynamic cascade” model showing how various
influences, playing out over childhood and
adolescence, can result in chronic and serious violence
in adolescence and beyond
– Biological factors (genes) and sociocultural context
factors (a disadvantaged, violence-prone
neighborhood) put certain children at risk from birth
– Then a chain of causal events plays out:
experiences with harsh, inconsistent parenting in
early childhood, poor readiness for school, early
behavior problems, failure in elementary school
(both academically and socially), lack of appropriate
parental supervision in early adolescence, and
affiliation with antisocial peers
The Adolescent – Antisocial Behavior
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Efforts to prevent antisocial behavior should
include
– An emphasis on positive parenting, beginning in
infancy or toddlerhood
– Comprehensive, school-based programs aimed
at children at risk
The Conduct Problems Prevention Research
Group intervention project used a multi-pronged
approach involving the teaching of social
information-processing and social skills, efforts to
improve academic skills, and behavior
management training for parents
– Proven effective in reducing antisocial behavior
and preventing diagnoses of conduct disorder
and related psychiatric disorders
The Adult – Changes in Moral Reasoning
• In Kohlberg’s 20-year longitudinal study (Colby
•
et al., 1983), most adults in their 30s still
reasoned at the conventional level, although
many of them had shifted from stage 3 to stage
4
There is evidence that social-cognitive skills
hold up well across the lifespan
– Most studies find no major age differences in
complexity of moral reasoning, at least when
relatively educated adults are studied and
when the age groups compared have similar
levels of education
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The Adult – Kohlberg’s
Theory in Perspective
Kohlberg’s idea that everyone progresses from
preconventional to conventional reasoning is
well supported
However, the idea that people continue to
progress from conventional to postconventional
reasoning is not supported
It has been charged that Kohlberg’s theory is
biased against people who are non-Western,
politically conservative, and female and that it
slights moral emotion and behavior
•
The Adult – Kohlberg’s
Theory in Perspective
Is Kohlberg’s theory culture-biased?
– Cross-cultural studies suggest that
postconventional moral reasoning emerges
primarily in Western democracies
• People in collectivist cultures that
emphasize social harmony often look like
stage 3 conventional moral thinkers in
Kohlberg’s system, but in fact they may
have sophisticated concepts of justice that
focus on the individual’s responsibility for
others’ welfare
•
The Adult – Kohlberg’s
Theory in Perspective
Is Kohlberg’s theory biased against political
conservatives?
– Researchers find some merit in the idea that
Kohlberg’s theory favors people who support
human rights and take liberal positions on
issues
•
The Adult – Kohlberg’s
Theory in Perspective
Is Kohlberg’s theory gender biased?
– Kohlberg’s stages were developed based on interviews
with males only and in some studies, women seemed to
reason at stage 3 when men usually reasoned at stage 4
– Carol Gilligan argued that boys, who traditionally have
been raised to be independent, come to view moral
dilemmas as conflicts between the rights of two or more
parties and to view laws as necessary for resolving these
inevitable conflicts (a perspective reflected in Kohlberg’s
stage 4 reasoning)
– Gilligan argued that girls are brought up to define their
sense of “goodness” in terms of their concern for other
people (a perspective that approximates stage 3 in
Kohlberg’s scheme)
The Adult – Kohlberg’s
Theory in Perspective
• Is Kohlberg’s theory gender biased
(continued)?
– Gilligan’s arguments
• A “masculine” morality of justice focused
on laws and rules, individual rights, and
fairness
• A “feminine” morality of care focused on
an obligation to be selfless and look after
the welfare of other people
• Neither morality is more “mature” than the
other
The Adult – Kohlberg’s
Theory in Perspective
– Although Gilligan’s claim that Kohlberg’s
theory is systematically biased against
females is not supported, her work increased
our awareness that both men and women
often think about moral issues in terms of
their responsibilities for the welfare of other
people and that Kohlberg emphasized only
one way – a legalistic and abstract way – of
thinking about right and wrong
The Adult – New Approaches to Morality
•
•
•
Developmentalists today are trying to correct for
Kohlberg's overemphasis on rational deliberation in
moral reasoning by exploring the emotional
component of morality
Recently researchers have examined
– The emotions and the regulation of emotions
when children and adults engage in moral or
immoral behavior
– The idea that gut emotional reactions and
intuitions play an important role in morality
Some scholars have now proposed dual-process
models of morality in which both deliberate thought
and emotion/intuition inform decisions about moral
issues and motivate behavior
The Adult – Religion and Spirituality
•
Religious values and beliefs guide the moral
thinking and behavior of many people
– Religiosity or religiousness has generally been
defined as sharing the beliefs and participating
in the practices of an organized religion
– Spirituality involves a quest for ultimate meaning
and for a connection with something greater
than oneself
• Spirituality may be carried out within the
context of a religion (some people are both
religious and spiritual) or outside it (some
people say they are spiritual but not religious)
The Adult – Religion and Spirituality
• In a longitudinal study, researchers Dillon and
Wink sought to understand changes over the
years in religiosity and spirituality
– Religiosity was strong in adolescence,
decreased somewhat in middle age, and
rose again in people’s late 60s and 70s
closer to its earlier levels
– Spirituality was judged to be at lower levels
than religiosity throughout adulthood and
changed more dramatically with age,
increasing significantly from middle age to
later adulthood, especially among women
The Adult – Religion and Spirituality
• Wink and Dillon (2003) found that individuals
•
are highly consistent over the years in their
degrees of religiosity and spirituality, probably
because of their personalities
Religiosity and spirituality contribute positively
to psychosocial adjustment but in different ways
The Adult – Religion and Spirituality
•
Religiosity contributes positively to psychosocial
adjustment
– Religiosity in late adulthood is correlated with a
sense of well-being stemming from positive
relationships with other people, involvement in
social and community service activities, and the
sympathetic and caring qualities associated with
Erikson's concept of generativity
– Highly religious adults are very involved in their
religious communities and act on their religious
beliefs by serving others
– Other research suggests that religious
involvement is linked to good health, good
mental health, and prosocial behavior
The Adult – Religion and Spirituality
• Spirituality contributes positively to
psychosocial adjustment
– Highly spiritual older adults have a sense of wellbeing derived from personal growth
– Spiritual adults are highly involved in activities that
allow them to express their creativity and build their
knowledge and skills
– Spiritual adults display qualities associated with
wisdom such as introspectiveness and insightfulness