L8 & 9 - Moral Development

Question 1

What are self-conscious emotions? When do they emerge? Role of audience?

Answer 1

• Self-awareness is thought to emerge at about 18 months (e.g. Mark test) - Both Apes and Infants can pass the rogue test
• Social emotions require an audience - feedback
  
  • e.g. 2 year old may express pride in front of an audience but an 8 year old can appraise his/her own action as pride-worthy (or not) even in the absence of an audience
  • Self-conscious emotions imply some thoughts about the actions of the self as good or bad, which probably arise because of awareness with the audience
    
    • Presence of actual audience becomes increasingly less important for self conscious emotions - appears to be a process of ****internalisation******

Question 2

What is identity formation and why is it important in moral judgement?

Answer 2

• Identity formation is generally thought to consist in a lessening of egocentricity and increasing of self-other differentiation
  
  • In order to be “moral” - Need to be able to distinguish between our self and others as otherwise “you” have no responsibilities

Question 3

What are the classical theories of moral development?

Answer 3

• Piaget (1932) & Kohlberg (1971) used structured tasks (clinical interview) to establish how children are able to reason about moral dilemmas or ethical situations
  
  • Both concluded that there is a clear developmental sequence in the child’s capacity to reason about moral dilemmas

Question 4

What is the background of Kohlberg’s theory?

Answer 4

• 1958 → Stages of moral reasoning
  
  • 6 stages & 3 levels
  • Progression through the stages as age increases
  • Each new stage reflects a qualitatively different, more adequate way of thinking than the one before it
  • Measured using “moral judgement interview”
• Built on the theories of Piaget
  
  • Discrete stages
  • Hierarchical structure

Question 5

What are the stages of Kohlberg’s moral reasoning?

Answer 5

Question 6

What is the pre-conventional morality stage?

Answer 6

1. Obedience & Punishment orientation
   
   • External consequences
   • Early childhood
   • Behave in a way to avoid punishment
   • “If someone is punished they must have done something wrong”
     
     • E.g. Drawing on the wall
2. Self-interest orientation
   
   • Early-mid childhood
   • “What is best for me?”
   • Does not include consideration of how others would view their behaviour (egocentric)
     
     • e.g. If you do your homework I will take you to the cinema - not teaching that homework is good to do for learning

Question 7

What is the conventional morality stage?

Answer 7

1. Interpersonal accord & conformity
   
   • Typical for adolescents & adults
   • Takes accounts of the views and expectations of the society
   • “Good girl/Good boy”
   • Moral action decisions based on what would be considered the best by others
     
     • e.g. helping an elderly person cross the world
2. Authority & social-order maintaining orientation
   
   • Moral actions obey laws & social conventions
   • Main focus is to maintain social order
   • “Beyond the individual”
     
     • e.g. reporting an incident of stealing

Question 8

What is the post-conventionality stage?

Answer 8

1. Social contract orientation
   
   • Laws & social rules are not set in stone & can be changed by consensus
   • Different opinions and beliefs are respected
   • Rules can be changed by the majority to benefit the majority
   • Moral dilemmas - e.g. Steal food to feed a starving child
   • Only 10 - 15% of the population
2. Universal ethical principles
   
   • Considered rare by Kohlberg
   • “Beyond the law”
   • Overarching ethical principles - e.g. dignity, human rights
   • Personal ideals may guide behaviour over and above social rules, laws and expectations
   • e.g. What happens when societal laws are considered immoral?

Question 9

Why is moral reasoning different to moral behaviour?

Answer 9

• Sometimes there might be two stages of moral reasoning happening at once to explain moral behaviour
• e.g. Man punches someone harassing a woman - is it because he wanted to protect her? Or did he think she’d be grateful & go out with him?

Question 10

Does Kohlberg’s theory address both genders?

Answer 10

• Gilligan (1982)
  
  • Kohlberg’s results based on a male sample
  • Ethics of care (women) vs ethics of justice (men)
    
    • Levels 3 (good girl) and level 4 (law & justice) should not be higher that one another but occur at a similar period
  • Focus on relationships, so the emotional facet of morality, more than laws (cognitive facet)

Question 11

How is development of moral reasoning not hierarchical?

Answer 11

• Different situations - different stage of moral reasoning
  
  • Social factors
  • Consequences
• People can reason at two stages simultaneously

Question 12

What are some other criticisms?

Answer 12

• Kohlberg’s scenarios were not ecologically valid
  
  • People might answer differently if they were actually in a situation not just imagining it
• Cultural variability in the relationship between morality and convention
  
  • Individualist versus collectivist
• Stage 6 is too rare
• Children under about 7 years of age find it very difficult to articulate reasons

Question 13

What is an alternative way to measure moral reasoning that has been developed?

Answer 13

• Turiel (1979, 1983)
  
  • Concerned with how children appraise (or judge) actions in moral terms (right or wrong) rather than what they would do in hypothetical situations
  • Reasons vs feelings (is it right or wrong?)
  • Turiel et al., have argued that even very young children, 36 months or younger, make a distinction between moral (feeling) and conventional (rules) social rules
  • Social conventions are behavioural conformities that can change with interactions of individuals within social systems vs moral prescriptions which are not alterable by consensus (more intrinsic)
    
    • Evidence for moral-conventional distinction (Smetana, 1981)
      
      • Moral transgressions (e.g. hitting) are judged to be more wrong in the absence of rules than conventional transgressions (e.g. not saying grace) by children as young as 30 months
      • Children agreed moral transgressions were more serious & more deserving of punishment
      • Despite a diverse age range of 30-57 months there were no differences
    • Shows..
      
      • Children are very sensitive to different kids of transgression and those relating to harm
      • Origins of such differential understanding lie in the different meaning that they have different responses they provoke in children and adults
      • Is a child’s understanding related to their feelings and empathy development?

Question 14

What could be the inherent social basis of moral systems?

Answer 14

• Kinship, filial connection, family, care for in-group members
• E.g. Trust can create harmony that can lead to moral cooperation
• But, how does this generalise to out-group members
  
  • Contact
  • Rules
  • Systems
  • Standards of engagement
    
    • e.g. legal system in Australian aboriginal culture

Question 15

What is the cognitive developmental approach to morality in terms of psychopathy?

Answer 15

• Blair → “Psychopaths are impaired in their ability to form associations between their behaviour and socially-relevant cues (aversive unconditioned stimuli)”
  
  • In other words, violence and aggression are overcome by processes of sympathy and empathy in non-psychopaths
  • Central to Blair’s original hypothesis is the Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM)
• “[Blair] considered the VIM to be a cognitive mechanism which, when activated by non-verbal communications of distress (i.e., sad facial expression, the sight and sound of tears), initiates a withdraw response; a schema will be activated predisposing the individual to withdraw from the attack. Consistent with this suggestion, Camras (1977) has observed that the display of distress cues (a sad facial expression) does result in the termination of aggression in 4- to 7-year-olds” (p. 3)
• Findings from Blair’s study on young adolescents
  
  • Adolescents with psychopathic tendencies make more errors than comparison children in their recognition of audio recordings of fear vocalizations. (There were no significant differences for the other emotions.)

Question 16

Can performance on the moral/convention distinction predict levels of childhood conduct problems?

Answer 16

• Sample
  
  • 102 Male residents at special school for those with emotional and behavioural difficulties
  • “Too problematic for education in mainstream”
  • Children screened with psychopathy screening device (PSD)
    
    • High = 27, low = 21 (excluded medium of 63)
• Task
  
  • Compared moral transgression (victims/harm other people) and conventional transgressions (consequences for social order, e.g. rebellious clothes) on certain judgements such as permissibility between high and low group
• Findings
  
  • High PSD group made significantly less of a moral/conventional distinction than low PSD group
  • High group judged moral transgressions to be less serious than the low group

Question 17

What were Blair’s previous views on the Violence Inhibition Model (VIM) and then his updated?

Answer 17

• Previous
  
  • The VIM is constituted as the reason for psychopathy as psychopathy is the inability to feel empathy.
  • Child without VIM would not be negatively reinforced so would be much more likely to show violent tendencies from a very early age
• Updated
  
  • Blairs research is a kind of extreme form of what is known as the sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy (Hume)

Question 18

What did Darwin think about moral development?

Answer 18

• Another sentimentalist was Darwin, who proposed something not too different to Blair
• Darwin thought we are driven by instincts
  
  • Social instincts - Impulsions which are constant and moderate
  • Appetites - Which are sudden and strong (e.g. aggression, sex drive)

Question 19

What is the brief belief behind moral understanding in sentamentalist traditions?

Answer 19

• In sentimentalist theories = Children are moral because they are empathic, so want to figure out how empathic they are
• Even those child researchers with a sentimentalist orientation realize what Aristotle articulated long ago: just because we feel pity does not imply that we will act on that feeling
• Behaviour is how we communicate what we feel
• Those interested in children’s moral reasoning or thinking have more recently focused on children’s abilities to identify and evaluate simple reasons for people’s actions: that is, children’s capacity to identify the intentions motivating people’s actions
  
  • This ‘capacity’ implies Theory of Mind (in the broad sense), because it is people’s motives and intentions that are the main objects of moral approval or disapproval

Question 20

How does Kohlberg’s theory help test whether a child has moral understanding?

Answer 20

Kohlberg characterized the young child’s morality as one of constraint: they justify acts as good/bad, right/wrong in terms of consequences (pre-conventional) or in terms of social norms and conventions (moral realism/conventional)

• Children before 6/7 look at the outcome to see whether something was ‘naughty’ whereas older children looked at the intentions of the character to make a judgement
• It turns out that young children privilege outcome, but they are not blind to intention
  
  • They judge B worse than C – true
  • But they also judge
    
    • C worse than A
    • D worse than B
  • So they are using both sorts of information (see Hayman & Gelman)
• Young children DO in fact balance motive – but they DO privilege outcome
• In fact, when judging whether someone is a nice or a nasty person, children as young as about 5 years old do show some capacity to associate the actors’ intentions with his/her traits (Heyman & Gelman, 1998)

However, their performance is not identical to adults; they do weigh outcome more heavily than adults

Question 21

What did Nunner-Winkler and Sodian (1988) find out about moral emotions?

Answer 21

• Asked questions
  
  • Is it wrong to steal?
    
    • 4 years → Yes
    • 8 years → Yes
  • How do you feel when you steal something that you want?
    
    • 4 years → Good
    • 8 years → Bad (guilty or ashamed)
• This task is a benchmark task as it appears to show that, despite awareness of moral cues, 4 years olds do not understand the emotionally binding nature of moral rules whereas 8 year olds do
• Yuill and colleagues found that when children between 5 and 7 years of age were directed to a transgressors wish they subsequently attributed more intensely positive emotions to the protagonists successful action(= stronger Happy Victimiser) than when they were first directed to a moral evaluation of the act itself and then asked to make the emotion attribution
  
  • Even 5 year olds seem to attuned to the transgressor’s intent

Question 22

How might personality play a mediating role on prediction of others behaviours?

Answer 22

Process of making behaviour-to-behaviour inferences can be decomposed into two components: behaviour-to-trait inferences and trait-to-behaviour predictions

Question 23

What was Malti & Krettenauer (2013) research into the relation of moral emotional attribution to prosocial and antisocial behaviour?

Answer 23

• Happy victimiser task allows a distinction to be made between children who attribute moral emotions and those who don’t, but what does that imply
• HV tasks tell us a lot - balances understanding of events and motives (cognitive part) with emotional outcomes (affective part)
• There is a consistent relation between moral emotion attribution (on the HV task) and social outcomes
  
  • More (stronger) moral emotions = more prosocial/less antisocial
  • Fewer (weaker) moral emotions = less prosocial/ more antisocial
• Conducted a meta-analysis of 4-20 year olds
• 42 studies with > 8000 participants
• RESULTS
  
  • There was a moderately strong relation between moral emotion attribution and antisocial behaviour: More moral children (i.e. fewer HV responses) showed less antisocial behaviour
  • Weaker relation between moral emotion attribution and prosocial behaviour: More moral children showed more prosocial behaviour
  • Moral self-concept in which you do not find the consequences of moral transgression to be very personally emotionally binding