Wk7 Pre-recorded Flashcards
What are 2 cognitive approaches to development of moral reasoning?
Piaget’s proposal of moral development
Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning
What was Piaget interested in studying?
Children’s understanding of rules and how they dealt with issues related to fairness
How did Piaget study children’s moral rules?
Piaget’s Inkblot Moral Puzzle - Children were presented with vignettes or stories and asked them about naughtiness. The protagonists caused damage with good or bad intent and the children were asked which protagonist was naughtier.
Explain Piaget’s Inkblot Moral Puzzle
One boy accidentally spills the ink when trying to help his father.
Another boy spills some ink even though he was told not to play with it.
Children were asked which boy was naughtier
What 2 major stages in moral development came out of Piaget’s Inkblot Moral puzzle
Moral realist
Moral subjectivist
How does a moral realist make decisions?
The judgement of which boy was naughtier was made based on the extent of the damage caused because they do not understand intentions.
What were the findings of the Inkblot Moral Puzzle?
Children below 7 could not understand the intention of the protagonist. (moral realist)
Children above 7 took into account the intention of the character. (moral subjectivist)
How does a moral subjectivist make decisions?
Base decisions on the subjective intentions of the character..
What are the 3 stages of Piaget’s Theory of Moral Judgement?
Morality of constraint/heteronomous
The transitional period
Autonomous morality
What happens at the morality of constraint/heteronomous stage of moral judgement?
Children less than 7 years old begin to become aware of fixed rules. They do not take into account people’s intentions.
Young children reward outcome, older children reward effort/intention.
What happens at the transitional period stage of moral judgement?
Children 7-11 learn that rules can be constructed by people and learn to take one another’s perspective through having more interaction with peers.
Still are conscious that rules are fixed.
What happens at the stage of autonomous morality of moral judgement?
By age 11/12, children understand that rules are not fixed. Rules can be negotiated by collective agreement.
Motives and intentions become crucial in judging people’s behaviour.
What is a methodological criticism of Piaget’s proposal?
Young children have memory limitations so may only focus on the latest information they were given (i.e., the scale of damage made by the character)
What did Wimmer et al. (1982) find out about whether children can distinguish intentionality/effort versus ability and outcome?
The character with more effort received more reward.
Even 4 year olds understand the causal relationship among effort, ability, and achievement outcome.
How does a merit and fairness experiment work?
Children get coins from a big bucket and the team is reward with stickers for each coin they collect.
The child has to decide how to share their stickers with their partner.
What have merit and fairness experiments found?
3 year olds choose to reward their peers based on merit. The children gave their puppet partner more stickers if they had worked harder to gather coins.
What is a limitation that has been found regarding the age Piaget suggested children understand intentions?
Research has found that children younger than 7 can take into account other people’s intentions when assessing the naughtiness of someone.
What did Kohlberg study?
Studied stages of moral judgement through the lifespan
What did Kohlberg propose?
Stages of moral development are discontinuous and hierarchical.
What did Kohlberg use to tell the story of moral dilemmas?
Vignettes
What are Kohlberg’s 6 stages of moral reasoning?
Obedience and punishment Self-interest Good boy/girl Law and order Social contract Principled conscience
What 2 stages were pre-conventional?
Obedience and punishment
Self-interest
What 2 stages were conventional?
Good boy/girl
Law and order
What 2 stages were post-conventional?
Social contract
Principled conscience
Is the stage of principled conscience achieved by everyone?
No
What happens in the stage of obedience and punishment?
Children up to 7 years old believe that rules are fixed. (similar to Piaget’s stage of moral constraint). If you do not comply with the rules, you get punished.
What happens in the stage of self-interest?
It is okay to disobey the rules but only if someone else disobeys the rules for them in return. They realise that different individuals have different viewpoints.
What happens in the stage of good boy/girl?
People may be good in order to be seen as being a good person by others. Their behaviour relates to the approval of others.
What happens in the stage of law and order?
The child thinks about what is best for society and the law when making decisions.
What happens in the stage of social contract?
The child becomes aware that there are times when rules work against the interest of some individuals, even if they might exist for the good of the greatest number.
What happens in the stage of principled conscience?
People develop their own set of moral guidelines which may or may not fit the law. People will be prepared to act to defend their principles even if it means suffering the consequences.
What age are children likely to be at stage 2 (self-interest)?
10 years
What age are children likely to be at stage 3 (good boy/girl)?
14 years
What age are people likely to be at stage 4 (law and order)?
25 years
What are strengths of Kohlberg’s proposal regarding the first 5 stages of moral reasoning?
There is evidence for the first 5 stages of moral reasoning which comes from studies in many different countries. This demonstrates that there are relative systematic changes with age in children’s moral judgement.
What is a limitation of the number of stages Kohlberg proposed?
There is controversy on whether there are 5 or 6 stages.
Do people with higher levels of cognitive skills/perspective taking have higher or lower levels of moral judgement?
Higher levels of moral judgement
What does Kohlberg’s theory help us understand?
Helps us understand how cognitive processes contribute to moral behaviour.
What is an issue with the methodology of Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning?
The stories/vignettes used were too abstract for young children to understand.
The way the researcher scored the children’s answers was subjective and open to researcher interpretation/bias.
What was an issue with the sample Kohlberg used to develop his stages of moral reasoning?
Kohlberg only interviewed males as it was believed that girls lagged behind in moral reasoning. Gender bias.
What did Gilligan propose about gender differences in moral reasoning?
Females are more likely to emphasise caring and responsibility whilst males focus on principles of justice and rights.
Females have a different social and moral understanding. Selfishness and responsibility is more present for them.
Males and females cannot be compared because they have different social and moral understandings.
What is a limitation regarding Kohlberg’s proposal of discrete stages?
Moral development does not follow discrete stages. The way one solves a moral dilemma depends on the situation in question. Reasoning from different stages may be used.
What is a problem with the scenarios Kohlberg provided?
They are not realistic. They are negative (present bad options - either steal, or let your wife die).
