Moral Development

and Aggression

1
 Lecture Overview
▪ Defining the Moral Domain
▪ Evolutionary Roots of Morality in Young Children
▪ Rule Internalization in the Context of Close Relationships
▪ Moral Reasoning Development
▪ The Development of Aggression
▪ Aggressive Behaviour in Infancy and Childhood
▪ Aggressiveness as a Trait: How Stable Is It?
▪ Aggression as a Behavioural Problem
▪ Social and Cultural Influences on Aggression
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 Defining the Moral Domain
▪ Morality: a set of principles or ideals that
– help to distinguish right from wrong
– to act on this distinction
– to feel pride in virtuous conduct and guilt (or other
unpleasant emotions) for conduct that violates one’s
standards

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 Defining the Moral Domain
Moral foundations theory
Human morality rests on five different moral foundations: innate origins of human
morality that results from various adaptive challenges in evolutionary history
▪ care: cherishing and protecting others;
▪ fairness: rendering justice according to shared rules;
▪ loyalty: standing with your group, family, or nation;
▪ authority: submitting to tradition and legitimate authority; and
▪ sanctity/purity: abhorrence for disgusting things, foods, and actions.

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 Defining the Moral Domain
Turiel’s social domain theory
▪ Children (and adults alike) operate on different sets of rules.
– Moral rules: standards of acceptable and unacceptable conduct that
focus on the rights and privileges of individuals
– Social-conventional rules: standards of conduct determined by
social consensus that indicate what is appropriate within a particular
social context
– Children and parents do not treat these two types of rules in the
same way.

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 Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children
Empathy and compassion
▪ Empathy:
– ability to experience the same emotion as other people
▪ Sympathy/compassion:
– ability to feel sorrow or concern for another
▪ Sympathetic distress:
– feelings of sympathy or compassion that may be elicited when we experience the
emotions of (i.e., empathize with) a distressed other
▪ Self-oriented distress:
– feeling of personal discomfort or distress that may be elicited when we
experience the emotions of (i.e., empathize with) a distressed other; thought to
inhibit altruism

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Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children

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 Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children
Social preference for helpfulness
▪ 6- to 12-month-old infants harbour a social preference for
helpfulness.
Prosocial helping
▪ 14- to 18-month-old toddlers are eager to help.
– Without being asked to do so and without being offered a benefit in return.
– Intrinsic motivation to help others forms an important evolutionary basis for
human altruism.

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 Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children
Beyond nature: cultural influences on sympathy and prosocial
behaviour
▪ Sharing, helping, and other forms of prosocial conduct are more
common.
▪ Forceful and punitive discipline inhibits altruism.
▪ Less-industrialized societies tend to have more altruistic children.
▪ The least altruistic cultures are those that focus on competition and
on individual rather than group goals.

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 Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children
Rule internalization in the context of close relationships
▪ Internalization: the process of adopting the attributes or standards of other people—taking
these standards as one’s own
Positive reinforcement in the context of close relationships
▪ Children begin to form a conscience when securely attached
▪ Mutually responsive relationship: parent–child relationship characterized by mutual
responsiveness to each other’s needs and goals and shared positive affect
▪ Committed compliance: compliance based on the child’s eagerness to cooperate with a
responsive parent who has been willing to cooperate with him or her
▪ Situational compliance: compliance based primarily on a parent’s power to control the
child’s conduct

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 Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children
The role of punishment
▪ Leads to immediate compliance but impedes moral
rule internalization.
▪ The effectiveness of induction may vary depending
on the child’s temperament.
▪ Other non-punitive techniques are also effective at
promoting moral behaviour.

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 Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children
Explaining the effects of cognitive
rationales
▪ Arise in children who are morally mature.
– The frequent use of power assertion is more often
associated with moral immaturity.
▪ Induction may be an effective method of moral
socialization.

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 Evolutionary Roots of Morality in
Young Children
Moral self-concept training
▪ As a means of establishing inhibitory controls.
▪ More effective when combined with praise for desirable
conduct.
Social-modelling influences
▪ Establish inhibitory controls in older children by appealing to
their maturity.
▪ Serve as models of self-restraint for younger siblings.

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 Moral Reasoning Development
Piaget’s theory of moral development
▪ Piaget’s theory views moral reasoning as progressing through a sequence of
three levels.
1. Premoral period:
– preschool years, little concern for rules
2. Heteronomous morality:
– ages 5 to 10, view rules of authority figures as sacred and unalterable
3. Autonomous morality:
– by 10 to 11 years, realize that rules are arbitrary agreements that can be
challenged and changed with consent of the people they govern

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 Moral Reasoning Development
Updates to Piaget’s theory
▪ Piaget’s claims, originally published in 1932, have been scrutinized in four
areas of research.
– Piaget was right that younger children assign more weight to consequences
and less weight to intentions than older children.
– Culture and society continue to influence children’s reasoning about lies, even
when they have reached the level of moral autonomy in Piaget’s sense.
– Piaget’s description of moral heteronomy and moral autonomy provides a
distorted picture of moral development.
– Six- to ten-year-olds do have ideas about what constitutes legitimate
authority, and those ideas are not based solely on an unwavering respect for
the sanctity or wisdom of adults, as Piaget had assumed.

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Moral Reasoning Development

Figure 15.2 Average ratings of an

actor’s behaviour for actors who
produced positive or negative
outcomes while serving either good
or bad intentions
Source: Reprinted with permission of Blackwell
Publishing, from “Factors Influencing Young
Children’s Use of Motives and Outcomes as Moral
Criteria,” by S.A. Nelson, 1980, Child Development,
51, pp. 823–29; permission conveyed through
Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

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 Moral Reasoning Development
Kohlberg’s theory of moral development
1. Preconventional morality
Morality based on consequences
1. Stage 1: punishment-and-obedience orientation
2. Stage 2: naive hedonism
2. Conventional morality
Desire to gain others’ approval
1. Stage 3: “good boy” or “good girl” orientation
2. Stage 4: social-order-maintaining morality
3. Postconventional morality
Principles of justice
1. Stage 5: social-contract orientation
2. Stage 6: morality of individual principles of conscience

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 Moral Reasoning Development
Empirical support for Kohlberg’s theory
– Levels and stages are universal
– Longitudinal evidence
– Cognitive prerequisites are essential
– Social-experience hypothesis: social experiences promote
moral growth by introductory cognitive challenges to one’s
current reasoning.
• Parental and peer influences
• Advanced education
• Cultural Influences

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 Moral Reasoning Development
Criticisms of Kohlberg’s approach
▪ Gender bias
▪ Link to moral conduct
– Mechanisms of moral disengagement: cognitive reframing of harmful
behaviour as being morally acceptable
– Aspect not covered by Kohlberg

▪ Underestimates young children

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 The Development of Aggression
Some factors that contribute to children’s aggression independently of their moral
development
▪ Aggression:
– behaviour performed with the intention of harming a living being who is motivated
to avoid this treatment
▪ Reactive aggression:
– aggressive acts for which the perpetrator’s major goal is to harm or injure a victim
▪ Proactive aggression:
– aggressive acts for which the perpetrator’s major goal is to gain access to objects,
space, or privileges
▪ Relational aggression:
– acts such as snubbing, exclusion, withdrawing acceptance, or spreading rumours that
are aimed at damaging a victim’s self-esteem, friendships, or social status

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 Aggressive Behaviour in Infancy and
Childhood
▪ Infancy: reactive aggression appears by the end of the
first year.
– Infants have conflicts over toys and other possessions.
▪ Childhood: aggression becomes less physical and
increasingly verbal.
– Somewhat less proactive and increasingly retaliatory
▪ Boys are more overtly aggressive.
▪ Girls are more relationally aggressive.

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Aggressive Behaviour in Infancy and
Childhood

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 Aggressive Behaviour in Infancy and
Childhood

Figure 15.4 Trajectories of mother-rated aggression for children from age 2 to 9 years
Source: Adapted from NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2004). “Trajectories of Physical Aggression from Toddlerhood to
Middle Childhood.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 69 (Serial No. 278).
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 Aggressiveness as a Trait:
How Stable Is It?
▪ Overt aggression declines with age, whereas more covert
forms of antisocial conduct increase with age.

Sex differences in aggressive behaviour

▪ Stable attribute for both males and females.
▪ Boys more physically and verbally aggressive than girls
– Relational aggression increases in girls during adolescence.
– Antisocial conduct increases in boys during adolescence.

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 Aggressiveness as a Trait:
How Stable Is It?

Figure 15.5 Aggression in

childhood predicts criminal
behaviour in adulthood for both
males and females.
Source: From “Stability of Aggression over Time and
Generations,” by L.R. Huesmann, L.D. Eron, M.M.
Lefkowitz, & L.O. Walder, 1984, Developmental
Psychology, 20, p. 1125. Copyright © 1984 by the
American Psychological Association. Reprinted by
permission.

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Aggression as a Behavioural Problem
Dodge’s social information-processing theory of
aggression
▪ Kenneth Dodge (1994) proposes that a child’s response
to an aggressive act will depend on the outcome of six
cognitive steps.
– A child’s mental state can influence any phase.
– Reactive aggressors over attribute hostile intent to peers.
– Proactive aggressors do not.

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Aggression as a Behavioural Problem

Figure 15.7 A social-cognitive model of

the reactive aggressor’s biased
attributions about ambiguous harmdoing
and their behavioural outcomes

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 Social and Cultural Influences on
Aggression
Coercive home environments: breeding grounds for aggression
▪ Coercive home environment:
– a home in which family members often annoy one another and
use aggressive or otherwise antisocial tactics as a method of
coping with these aversive experiences
▪ Negative reinforcer:
– any stimulus whose removal or termination as the consequence of
an act will increase the probability that the act will recur

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 Social and Cultural Influences on
Aggression
Methods of controlling aggression in young children
▪ Creating “nonaggressive” play environments
▪ Relying on control procedures such as time-out and the
incompatible response technique
▪ Implementing social-cognitive interventions

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