T6 - Moral Development Flashcards
Aggression:
- define aggression
- hostile aggression
- instrumental aggression
- Relational aggression
Trends of aggression:
aggression = behaviour performed with the intention of harming a living being who is motivated to avoid this treatment.
Hostile aggression = an aggressive act in which the main goal is to harm or injure the victim.
Instrumental = an aggressive act in which the main goal is to gain access to objects, space, or privileges.
Relational aggression = an aggressive act in which the main goal is to damage a person’s self- esteem, friendships or social status
Trends
- Very young boys are not more aggressive than girls
- It is not until age 2 1/2 to 3 that sex differences in aggression are reliable, and this is clearly
enough time for gender typing to have steered boys and girls in different directions
The social information-processing theory of aggression:
- 6 stages
- 4 influential factors
Harmful event or social problem occurs:
- child encodes situation and available social cues
- Child interprets the situation and available social cues
- Child formulates a goal, a desired outcome
- Child generates possible strategies to achieve goal
- Child evaluates which strategy will best achieve their goal and selects
- Child enacts response
Factors:
- Past social experiences
- social expectations
- knowledge of social rules
- emotionality/emotional regulation skills
What are Reactive Aggressors?
What are Proactive aggressors?
What is hostile attribution bias?
Reactive Aggressors:
- Children who display high levels of hostile, retaliatory aggression because they over attribute hostile intents to others and can’t control their anger long enough to seek nonaggressive solutions to social problems.
- The mental states of reactive aggressors, who have a history of bickering with peers, are likely to include an expectancy that “others are hostile to me
Proactive Aggressors:
- Highly aggressive children who find aggressive acts easy to perform and who rely heavily on aggression as a means of solving social problems or achieving other personal objectives
- Because these children do not feel especially disliked, they are not so inclined to quickly attribute
hostile intent to a harm doer. But this does not mean that the proactive aggressor is inclined to let the incident pass - likely to carefully formulate an instrumental goal and decide that an aggressive response is likely to be most effective at achieving this aim.
Hostile attribution bias = a tendency to view harm done under ambiguous circumstances as having stemmed from a hostile intent on the part of the harm doer; characterises reactive aggressors.
The social Learning approach to aggression
- children learn from direct reinforcement
- Bandura theorised that children learn from vicarious reinforcement, or observational learning
- Vicarious reinforcement = tendency to repeat or duplicate behaviours for which others are being rewarded
- He famously demonstrated this through his Bobodoll experiments.
Nature of Bullies and Victims:
- trends of bullies
- Types of Victims (2)
Bullies typically:
- Bully in an effort to raise their social standing,
- View aggression positively,
- Have trouble following rules,
- Show little concern for the feelings of others.
Victims:
- more diverse as a group
- may be passive or sometimes provocative
Types:
- Passive victims (of aggression)
- Socially withdrawn, anxious l children with low self-esteem whom bullies
- Torment, even though they appear to have done little to trigger such abuse. - Provocative Victims
- Restless, hot-tempered and oppositional children who are victimised because they often
irritate their peers
Role of culture, social and home environment in the development of aggression:
Culture:
- some may condone or fail to discourage aggressive behaviour
Social:
- Social class differences in aggression may be due to:
- Differences in child rearing,
- Approaches to conflict (some encourage the development of the hostile Attributional bias),
- Economic, environmental, social and emotional stressors.
Home environment:
- Conflict between parents may contribute to the development of aggression.
- This is particularly the case when parents become emotionally unavailable.
- Hostile family environments are therefore a vicious cycle
What is altruism?
- trends of altruism
Altruism = genuine concern for the welfare of other people and a willingness to act on that concern.
Trends:
- Girls are more likely to help than boys but the extent to the help is generally the same
- Looking good or attaining status or dominance over others seems to be more important to
boys than to girls
Even very young children are capable of pro-social behaviour, though its expression may
depend on:
- Temperament- 2-year-olds who are behaviourally inhibited are likely to become highly upset by others’ distress and are more likely than uninhibited toddlers to tum away from a distressed acquaintance in an attempt to regulate their own arousal
- Parenting styles
Ages:
- <3 years - capable of pro social behaviour but unlikely to exhibit
- 4-6 years - exhibit real helping acts and are more self sacrificing
- 6+ - pro social conduct becomes increasingly common.
What is Pro-social Moral Reasoning? (4 stages)
What is empathy and how does it promote altruism?
- sympathetic empathic arousal
- self-orientated distress
Stage 1. Hedonistic
- <6 years
- concern for self.
- giving help is most likely if it benefits self
Stage 2. Needs orientated
- 5-9 years
- Others needs are legitimate basis for helping but little evidence of sympathy or guilt for not helping
Stage 3. Stereotyped/approval oriented
- 8-13 years
- concerned for approval of good and bad
Stage 4. Internalised
- 10-
Empathy
- Sympathetic empathic arousal, rather than self-oriented distress, that should eventually come to promote altruism
- The ‘felt-responsibility hypothesis’: the theory that empathy may promote altruism by causing one to reflect on altruistic norms and thus to feel some obligation to help others who are distressed.
Sympathetic empathic arousal:
- Feelings of sympathy or compassion that may be elicited when we experience the emotions of a distressed other; thought to become an important mediator of altruism
Self-oriented distress:
- A feeling of personal discomfort or distress may be elicited when we experience the emotions
of a distressed other; though to inhibit altruism
What is morality?
Explain the affective component of morality.
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 (or other unpleasant emotions) for conduct that violates one’s standards
- An affective, or emotional, component that consists of the feelings (guilt, concern for others’ feelings, etc.) that surround right or wrong actions and that motivate moral thoughts and actions
Piagets theory of moral development (3 stages)
- Pre-moral period:
- child has little respect for or awareness of socially defined rules - Heteronomous Morality:
- External morality - rules from other.
- moral reasoning is superficial and absolute, Justice is eye for eye
- views rules of authority as sacred and unalterable. - Autonomous Morality:
- morality based on your own rules. Children recognise there is no absolute right or wrong and that morality depends on intentions not consequences.
Kohlberg’s theory of moral development
3 levels, 2 stages in each
Level 1. Pre-conventional Morality:
- stage 1 - punishment and obedience orientated
- follow the rules and avoid trouble
- stage 2 - naive hedonism
- satisfy your own needs
Level 2 - Conventional Morality:
- stage 3 - good boy or good girl orientation
- please and help others. show concern through trust and loyalty
- stage 4 - social order maintaining morality
- maintain law and order, respect authority
Level 3 - Post-conventional morality
- stage 5 - the social contract orientation
- while rules may exist, sometimes they need breaking
- stage 6 - morality of individual principles of conscience
- what is right depends on self chosen morals of human rights and respect for humans.
