Week 11 - Morality& Social Domain Flashcards
What is Morality?
- Judgments of right and wrong pertaining to others’ welfare, rights, and fairness
- How should people behave towards one another?
Morality before 2 yo
Before the age of 2-years, children are concerned with the well-being of others
Children are more likely to help someone who:
• Is in need
• Has been harmed
Piaget’s Theory of Morality
Stage theory of moral development • Developed by: • Watching children play games • Interviewing children about different types of transgressions 3 stages: 1. premoral development 2. heteronomous stage 3. autonomous stage
Premoral development
up to 4 yrs
- no explicit awareness of rules, no use of moral principles or notions of justice
Heternomous stage
4-10 yrs
- rules are seen as unchanging and external, like physical laws
- judgements of culpability are based on the act’s consequences rather than intention
- little sense of what punishment is appropriate for what transgression
Autonomous stage
10-11 yrs
- rules are seen as human agreement that can be changed if both parties agree
- judgement of culpability based partly on intention
- punishment should be appropriate to the level of transgression
In Piaget’s experiments on morality why did children younger than 6 answer differently than adults?
Value outcomes over intentions
• Task demands
Study: Selective Helping in Young Children
(1) Neutral condition
• Actor comments on belt and necklace in tray
• Actor comments on remaining sheets of paper or the other ball of clay
(2) Harm condition
• At end of each presentation, actor said “I’m going to
take/tear/break this now”
(3) Help condition
• Recipient accidentally damages her own property and the actor helps her
Test trial
• Actor and neutral person each played an individual color
matching game
• Put their three balls in the slots, and then simultaneously reach for a ball in the middle and hold that pose
• Child then gives the ball to one of the two people
• After they gave the ball, they were given a second ball so that they could help the other person, too
Study: Selective Helping in Young Children 2nd study
Same design, but replace harm and help conditions with:
(1) Intended-but-failed to harm
• The actor says “I’m going to break/tear this but then can’t do it
(2) Accidental harm
• Actor admired the clay bird but then accidentally ruined it giving it back
–> children more likely to help person with good intentions
Three distinct domains of social knowledge
1) Moral
2) Social Convention
3) Personal
Social Knowledge: Moral
- Concerned with welfare and fairness
- Universal
- Impersonal
- Determined by criteria other than agreement or consensus
- Moral wrongness is an intrinsic feature of the act
- Causes harm
Social Knowledge: Social Convention
- Shared norms that smooth social interactions
- Change as a function of context
- Agreed upon
- Alterable
Social Knowledge: Personal
- Control over body, privacy, choice of friends or activities
- Autonomy
When are children aware of rules?
- Piaget argued that children younger than 4-years-of-age did not understand rules or recognize when people had broken rules
- Research suggest that children start to be aware of adult standards/rules during their second year
- For example, Judy Dunn conducted an observational study of family interactions
- 14-month-olds reactions to transgressions by a sibling indicate that they understand that rule is being broken
How do parents act when conventions are violated?
- Tell the child to stop with no explanation
- Make statements about disorder
- Make rule statements
- Respond with disgust and annoyance
How do parents act when moral transgressions are made?
- Tell the child why the act was wrong
- Ask the child to take the other’s perspective
- Respond with anger
How do children view moral transgressions differently?
Compared to conventional transgressions, both 3- and 4-year-olds rated moral transgressions as:
• More generalizable
• More independent of rules and authority
• Less alterable
• 4-year-olds rated moral transgressions as more deserving of punishment
Prosocial Behaviour
voluntary behavior intended to benefit others
What is needed to produce prosocial behavior?
- Recognize a negative state
- Identify the cause of the negative state
- Be motivated to act
3 types of negative states
Instrumental
Material
Emotional
Varieties of Prosocial Behaviour
Helping - understanding goal directed behaviour Sharing - giving away a desirable resource Comforting - engage in affective perspective taking
helping, sharing, and comforting
- produced in response to a negative state
- emerge at different ages
- not necessarily correlate
- show unique patterns of variability
Prosocial behaviour development variability
- Unique ages of onset
- Unique developmental trajectories and
uncorrelated patterns of production - Distinct patterns of production in atypical
development (i.e., autism)
Nature of Prosocial Development
Natural Tendency View:
• innate inclination to act on behalf of others
• socialization second
Social-Interactional View:
• innate inclination to interact
• socialization firs
Prosocial Behavior Development in the Cultural
Context
Cultural model of autonomy: Western, urban, middle class with autonomy as developmental organizer (urban Montreal, WEIRD kids)
Cultural model of relatedness: Traditional village context with relatedness as developmental organizer (rural Mexico)
In both cultural contexts:
• Prosocial behaviours were responsive to need
• Varieties of prosocial behaviour were produced at
similar relative frequencies
• helping > comforting > sharing
However, children in Mexico produced fewer prosocial
behaviours in general
In both cultural contexts:
• Children displayed similar types and frequencies of
need
• Children were similarly responsive to need
• Varieties of prosocial behaviour patterned similarly
across the two contexts
