The Development of Moral Reasoning, Fairness and Pro-social Behaviour

Question 1

Piaget’s (1932/65) proposal of moral judgement: give a brief overview of rules of games and moral rules.

What did Piaget study?
What was he interested in?

What were the moral rules?

Answer 1

Piaget studied children playing marbles.
Piaget was interested in how children dealt with issues related to rules and fairness.
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Moral rules:
Asked children ‘why is it wrong to lie or steal?’ or presented children with vignettes or stories and asked them about ‘naughtiness’. Protagonist caused damage with good or bad intent.

Question 2

Give a brief overview of Piaget’s Inkblot moral puzzle - damage.

Answer 2

Scenario is: One little boy wants to help his father by filling the ink-well. He accidentally spills it and makes a large stain. The other little boy plays with the ink-well even though it is forbidden and has been told many times not to touch it. He spills some ink and makes a small stain. Which boy is naughtier?

Question 3

What were the results of Piaget’s inkblot moral puzzle.?

Answer 3

Children below age 7:
The boy who made the big stain is naughtier. His intention is immaterial. Moral realist: judgement is based on the extent of damage caused.

Children above age 7: The boy who made the large stain is not naughty. His intention was good. Moral subjectivist: subjective factors, including intentions, are considered.

Question 4

What are the 3 key factors of Piaget’s Theory of Moral Judgement?

Answer 4

Morality of constraint/heteronomous.

Transition period.

Autonomous morality.

Question 5

What aged children show morality of constraint/heteronomous? Give a brief overview of this concept.

What do children start to become aware of?
Who specifies rules?
Do intentions matter?
What do young and older children rewards?

Answer 5

Children younger than 7. At this age, children start being aware of rules.

Rules are specified by an authority figure and are absolute.

Intentions do not matter as rules are fixed. Only consequence of actions are relevant.

Young children reward outcome, older children reward effort/intentions.

Question 6

What makes children believe that rules are ‘real things’ i.e. not abstract?

Answer 6

Their cognitive immaturity.

Question 7

Piaget: What age is the transitional period?

Answer 7

Age 7/8 to 10/11.

Question 8

Piaget: What is the transitional period?

Answer 8

Children have more interaction with their peers. This leads them to learn that rules can be constructed by the group and increasingly learn to take one another perspective.

This allows them to become more autonomous in their thinking about moral issues. Nevertheless, they might still be conscious that rules are fixed, especially in front of someone who they think is an authority figure.

Question 9

Piaget: what age is the stage of autonomous morality?

Answer 9

11 or 12, moral relativism emerges, with all normal children reaching this stage.

Question 10

Piaget: what is the autonomous stage?

Answer 10

Rules are not fixed. They might be the product of social agreement. Hence rules can be negotiated by collective agreement.

Children start evaluating the fairness of the punishment delivered by adults.

Now motives and intentions become crucial in judging peoples behaviours.

Question 11

What evidence is there to support Piaget’s proposal?

Answer 11

There is evidence from children from many different countries that motives and intentions are taken into consideration as children grow older.

Question 12

What methodological criticism is there for Piaget’s proposal?

Answer 12

Stories place large demand on memory (for younger children).

Information on intentions of the character appear first in the story.

Information on a scale of damage made by the character appear last in the story.

So due to limitations on memory, younger children might focus on what was said more recently/last.

Question 13

Give an overview of Wimmer, Wachter & Perner (1982) study: Who should be rewarded with more cookies?

Answer 13

Participants: 76 kids aged 4,6&8.
Material: a reward allocation task, Pps were to allocate a reward to one of two characters in a two character story.

One boy is lazy and puts in no effort but he is big (has high ability) he paints a lot of the fence (high outcome).
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The other boy puts in a lot of effort but he is small (low ability) and only paints a little of the fence (low outcome).

Results: no age difference in effort. The character with more effort received more reward.

Conclusions: even 4 y/o understand the casual relationship among effort, ability and achievement outcome.

Question 14

What is the Merit and fairness experiment?

Answer 14

A psychological experiment aiming to measure a vert complex human concept (merit and fairness).

Question 15

How did the merit and fairness experiment work?

Answer 15

Game of getting coins from a big bucket.

The puppet and a 3 to 5 yr old participants.

The child/puppet team us rewarded with stickers for each coin they collect from inside the big bucket,

The coins are then exchanged for prizes, such as sticker.

The child has to decide how to share his or her prized stickers with their puppet partners.

Results: the simple game revealed that, by the age of 3, children choose to reward their peers based on merit. The children gave the puppet more stickers if it had worked harder.

Question 16

What did Lawrence Kohlberg (1976) propose?

Answer 16

That moral development goes through different stages that are discontinuous and hierarchical.

He used vignettes to tell the story of moral dilemmas.

Question 17

What was Kohlbergs moral dilemma vignette?

Answer 17

There was only one drug that could save a mans wife. The druggist charges 10x the cost to make it. He cant get the money. The man breaks into the chemist and steals it. Should he have stolen the drug? Would it be wrong if he did steal it?

Question 18

What are Kohlbergs 6 stages?

Answer 18

1. Obedience and punishment
2. self interest (Pre-conventional)
3. Good boy/girl
4. Law and order (conventional)
5. Social contract
6. Principled conscience. (post-conventional)

Question 19

What are the strengths of Kohlbergs proposal?

Answer 19

1. Seems to be evidence for the first 5 stages of moral reasoning proposed by Kohlberg.
2. Evidence for these stages comes from studies in many different countries/societies/ethnicities (not all).
3. It demonstrates that there are relative systematic changes with age in children’s moral judgement.
4. Children with higher levels of perspective taking or cognitive skills have higher levels of moral judgement.
5. Kohlbergs theory helps us understand how cognitive processes contribute to moral behaviour.

Question 20

What are the 4 main criticisms for Kohlbergs proposal?

Answer 20

1. Methodology
2. Gender bias
3. No discrete stages
4. Unrelaistic stories

Question 21

What is wrong with Kohlbergs methodology?

Answer 21

1. The story was too abstract for young children to understand.
2. The method of scoring the answers of the children were subjective and up to interpretation by the researcher.

Question 22

What vignette was used for Rest et al., (1999)?

Answer 22

A small village in India has a food shortage. Famine is worse than before. Rich man is hoarding food to charge lots of money for it. Young man thinks abut stealing food for family.

Question 23

What was the method for Rest et al., 1999 experiment?

Answer 23

Rate from 1 to 5 the following items:
Is Mustaq courageous enough to risk getting caught for stealing?
Isn’t it only natural for a loving father to care so much for his family that he would steal?
Shouldn’t community laws be upheld?
Does Mustaq know a good recipe for preparing soup from tree bark?

Question 24

What gender bias is there in Kohlbergs proposal?

Answer 24

He developed the proposal by only interviewing boys and men and it was believed girls lagged behind in moral reasoning.
Gilligan (1977, 1982) claim that while males focus on principles of justice and rights when reasoning for moral dilemmas, females are more likely to put emphasis on caring and responsibility.

Question 25

What were Gilligans (1977) views on moral development?

Answer 25

Claims that theories of moral development focused on male development and these theories could not account for female moral development.

Cant compare male and female because there are differences due to females having a different social and moral understanding.

Question 26

What study did Gilligan 1977 conduct?

Answer 26

Interviewed 29 women referred for abortion and pregnancy counselling services.

1st part of interview: based on decision of whether to have baby or not. Whether considering any alternative, how decision was affecting them personally.

2nd part: Asked women to perform three of Kohlbergs moral dilemmas.

Question 27

What did Gilligans study in women in abortion & pregnancy counselling conclude?

Answer 27

Females have different moral language: selfishness and responsibility was very present.

The developmental trajectory of moral reasoning of females is different from males.

Question 28

Why is it bad that Kohlbergs proposal does not have any discrete stages?

Answer 28

At any time, a person might solve a moral dilemma using reasoning corresponding to stage 3. What would determine the use of one type of reasoning over another is the situation in question. With time, reasoning from a particular stage becomes dominant, but reasoning from lower stages might still be used.

Question 29

Why were the stories Kohlberg used bad?

Answer 29

one of them only had 2 bad options (steal or let wife die).

very far removed from children and even young adolescents.

Question 30

What is prosocial behaviour?

Answer 30

Voluntary behaviour intended to benefit another, such as helping, sharing and comforting others.

Question 31

What were the results to Eisenberg-berg prosocial moral judgement vignette?

Answer 31

Similar results to Kohlbergs stages:
5y/o focus on interests.
Older children focus on more pro-social behaviour and on empathy.
Overall, using Esienbergs ‘prosocial reasoning’ stories, children seem to display more sophisticated forms of reasoning at an early age than the results shown by Kohlbergs.
The types of stories being presented to children make a difference.

Question 32

What are Eisenbergs 5 stages of pro-social behaviour?

Answer 32

1. Hedonistic orientation
2. Needs-based orientation
3. Approval and/or stereotyped organisation.
4. self-reflective empathetic orientation.
5. Strongly internalised stage.

Question 33

What do children using higher-level prosocial moral reasoning tend to be behaviour wise?

Answer 33

More sympathetic and prosocial in their behaviour than children who used lower-level prosocial moral judgement.

Question 34

What are the ages of criminal responsibility in England and Wales?

Answer 34

Children aged 10+.
Children aged 10-17 are treated differently than adults.
Young adults aged 18 are treated as adults.

Question 35

What did Nelson, Smith & Dodd (1990) find regarding moral reasoning in juvenile delinquents?

Answer 35

A meta-analysis of 15 studies.

They concluded that they show immature moral reasoning.

Question 36

What did Romarel, Fernandez & Gomez (2018) find regarding moral reaonsing?

Answer 36

A meta analysis of 72 studies.

Concluded there is a strong relationship between moral reasoning and juvenile delinquency.

Question 37

Give a brief overview of the Smetana et al., (1990) study regarding moral reasoning of juvenile delinquents.

Answer 37

A review of 50 studies comparing moral development of juvenile delinquents and non-delinquent age adolescents.

Controlling variables: gender, age, economic status and intelligence.

Results: juvenile delinquents showed a lower level of moral development than their non-delinquent age adolescents.

Conclusions: criminal youth tend to show in general less mature moral reasoning than non-criminal youth.

Question 38

Give a brief overview of Stams et al., (2006) study.

Answer 38

Meta analysis of 50 studies too examine whether delinquent adolescents had lower levels of moral judgement than non-delinquent adolescents.

Variables that may affect levels of moral judgement:
Socio-economic background, gender (females seem to have higher levels of moral reasoning than males), intelligence and institutionalisation.

Results: the moral judgement of juvenile delinquents is substantially lower compared to non-delinquents.

Question 39

What were the results of Stams et al., (2006) meta-analysis?

Answer 39

The differences on lower moral judgement were larger for:
Male offenders
Late adolescents
Delinquents with low intelligence
Incarcerated delinquents
Lengthy incarcerated delinquents. 

Medium differences for:
Average intelligence
Female offenders
Non-incarcerated delinquents
Early - middle adolescents. 

Conclusion: Moral judgement is strongly associated with juvenile delinquency, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, culture, gender, age and intelligence.