Aggression, Altruism, and Moral Development

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Aggression, Altruism, and Moral Development

• Chapter 14

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• Instrumental aggression major goal is to gain
  access to objects, space, or privileges
• Hostile aggression major goal is to harm or
  injure
• Both form and expression of aggression change
  with age

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Figure 14.1 Trajectories of mother-rated
aggression for children from age 2 to age 9
years. ADAPTED FROM NICHD EARLY CHILD CARE
RESEARCH NETWORK, 2004.
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Rough-and-Tumble vs. Aggression?

• Does rough and tumble play promote social
  development?
• rough and tumble could easily be misinterpreted

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Costabile et al. (1991)

• Strength and type of blows
• Facial expressions
• Presence or absence of laughter and angry words
• Presence or absence of a crowd watching
• Presence or absence of injury and crying

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Sex Differences

• On average, boys more aggressive
• Not until 2 ½-3 years of age though!
• Biological differences
• Socialization differences

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGGRESSION

• Overt aggression declines from middle childhood
  through adolescence
• Relational aggression in girls, and indirect
  aggression in males increases

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Individual Differences in Aggression

• Aggressive toddlers ? aggressive 5 year olds
• Aggression between 3 and 10 ? aggression and
  antisocial behavior later in life

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Figure 14.2. Aggression in childhood predicts
criminal behavior in adulthood for both males and
females. FROM HUESMANN, ERON, LEFKOWITZ,
WALDER, 1984.
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Individual Differences in Aggression

• Few individuals are highly aggressive
• 10-15 of classmates are abused by bullies
• Proactive aggressors
• Reactive aggressors

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Social Cognition of Aggression

• Dodge et al.
• Kindergarten to fifth grade
• Given written descriptions of aggressive and
  nonaggressive children, asked to name others in
  class who fit description
• Aggressive males
• Participants aggressive and nonaggressive boys

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Social Cognition of Aggression

• Stories varied on
• Actions
• Negative outcome vs. Ambiguous outcome
• Recipient of action
• Self vs. Other
• Instigator of action
• Aggressive vs. Nonaggressive
• Task
• Decide why event occurred, indicate how they
  would respond

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Social Cognition of Aggression

• Results
• Hostile intent attributed more often when
  aggressive boy was instigator
• Hostile intentions attributed to negative
  outcomes more than ambiguous outcomes
• When imagined self as recipient, aggressive boys
  attributed more hostile intent, even in ambiguous
  situations (hostile attributional bias)

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Social Cognition of Aggression

• aggressive boys biased
• may lead retaliation
• other children biased
• This seems to be a characteristic of reactive
  aggressors

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Social Cognition of Aggression

• Proactive aggressors may have friends and do not
  feel as disliked as reactive aggressors, so they
  may not be as likely to have a hostile
  attributional bias
• Proactive aggressors plan an aggressive
  response to achieve an instrumental goal
• Expect positive outcomes
• Feel capable of dominating others

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Support for Aggression

• Peers
• Reinforcement
• Elicitation
• Families
• Coercive cycles

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Origins of Coercive Cycles

• Parental behavior
• Ineffective at controlling child, parent loses
  control
• Indiscriminate use of rewards/punishments
• Characteristics of child
• Arrested development
• Insensitive to social stimuli

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Prosocial Behavior and Altruism

• Altruism concern for the welfare of others and
  willingness to act on that concern
• 12 to 18 month olds offer toys to peers
• Toddlers can express sympathy
• Verbally rebuking children and physically
  punishing them reduces compassion
• Discipline based on affective explanation
  increases compassion

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Prosocial Behavior and Altruism

• Developmental Trends in Altruism
• 2-3 year olds show sympathy/compassion
• 4-6 year olds more real helping acts, fewer
  during pretend play

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Prosocial Behavior and Altruism

• Sex Differences in Altruism
• Girls are more likely to be helpful, generous,
  and compassionate than boys (small difference)
• Boys less cooperative and more competitive more
  interested in looking good or attaining
  status/dominance over others

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Prosocial Reasoning

• Children with well-developed role-taking skills
  are more helpful
• Prosocial moral reasoning
• Preschoolers tend to be self-serving
• Older adolescents are much more responsive to the
  needs of others

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• One day a girl named Mary was going to a friends
  birthday party. On her way she saw a girl who
  had fallen down and hurt her leg. The girl asked
  Mary to go to her house and get her parents so
  they could come and take her to a doctor. But if
  Mary did, she would be late to the party and miss
  the ice-cream, cake, and all the games. What
  should Mary do?

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Prosocial Reasoning

• Eisenberg found that responses formed an
  age-related sequence
• Hedonistic responses motivated by consideration
  of selfish gain
• Needs oriented consideration of others
  feelings and needs
• Stereotyped try to gain approval
• Empathic orientation judgments include
  sympathetic feelings
• Internalized values based on internalized values

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Prosocial Reasoning

• Also observed behavior in classroom for 2 months
  (4 and 5 year olds)
• Hedonistic and needs-oriented were most common
  responses
• Needs-oriented reasoning more likely to share
• Hedonistic less likely to share
• Empathy an emotional experience in response to
  another persons emotional state or situation
  that is similar to that persons emotion and is
  accompanied by concern for the other person

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Socialization of Prosocial Behavior

• Modeling
• Disciplinary techniques (Hoffman)
• Power assertion
• Love withdrawal
• Induction

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Socialization of Prosocial Behavior

• Zahn-Waxler Radke-Yarrow
• Measured mothers reactions to events where their
  child caused distress or witnessed distress
• Affective explanation
• Neutral explanation
• No explanation

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Socialization of Prosocial Behavior

• Attributions
• Attribute a behavior to selfbowling study

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Moral Development

• How Developmentalists Look at Morality
• Affective component stressed by psychoanalytic
  theorists moral affects
• Cognitive component stressed by
  cognitive-developmental theorists moral
  reasoning
• Behavioral component stressed by social
  learning and social information-processing
  theorists moral behavior

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Moral Development

• The Affective Component of Moral Development
• Freuds Theory of Oedipal Morality
• Superego develops during phallic stage
• Identifies with same-sex parent
• Internalizes same-sex moral standards
• Girls have weaker superegos than boys

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Moral Development

• Evaluation of Freuds Theory
• Pride, shame, guilt are important for ethical
  conduct
• Internalization of standards is vital
• Details of theory unsupported
• Harsh discipline less morality
• Boys not more moral than girls
• Underestimated when children begin expressing
  morality

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• Story A. A little boy who is called John is in
  his room. He is called to dinner. He goes into
  the dining room. But behind the door there was a
  chair, and on the chair there was a tray with 15
  cups on it. John couldnt have known that there
  was all this behind the door. He goes in, the
  door knocks against the tray, bang go the 15
  cups, and they all get broken.

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• Story B. Once there was a little boy whose name
  was Henry. One day when his mother was out he
  tried to reach some jam in the cupboard. He
  climbed onto a chair and stretched out his arm.
  But the jam was too high up, and he couldnt
  reach itWhile he was trying to get it, he
  knocked over a cup. The cup fell down and broke.

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Moral Development

• The Premoral Period
• Heteronomous Morality
• Objective responsibility
• Immanent justice
• Autonomous Morality

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Moral Development

• Moving From Heteronomous to Autonomous Morality
• Cognitive maturation decline in egocentrism,
  increase in role-taking
• Social experience equal status with peers is
  vital
• Lessen respect for adult authority
• Increases self and peer respect
• Shows rules are arbitrary

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Moral Development

• Evaluation of Piaget
• Describes general direction of change in moral
  judgment fairly well
• Underestimates moral capacities of young children

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Moral Development

• Intentions Nelson (1980)
• Read story in which child threw a ball to
  playmate
• Motives were good or bad
• Consequences were positive or negative
• Acts ending in positive consequences judged more
  favorably than those ending in harm
• Good intentions judged more favorably than bad

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Moral Development

• by age 4, recognize the difference between
  truthfulness and lying
• approve of telling the truth and disapprove of
  lying
• evaluate personal injury more harshly than
  property injury
• more tolerant of immoral acts followed by an
  apology

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Moral Development

• Social Conventional Reasoning (Turiel)
• 2 and 3 y/o interviewed about drawings depicting
  familiar moral and social conventional
  transgressions
• By 34 months, saw moral transgressions as more
  wrong
• By 42 months, said moral violations would still
  be wrong if undetected

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• In Europe, a woman was near death from a special
  kind of cancer. There was one drug that doctors
  thought might save her. It was a form of radium
  that a druggist in the same town had recently
  discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but
  the druggist was charging 2000, or 10 times the
  cost of the drug, for a small (possibly
  life-saving) dose. Heinz, the sick womans
  husband, borrowed all the money he could, about
  1000, or half of what he needed. He told the
  druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to
  sell the drug cheaper or to let him pay later.
  The druggist replied No, I discovered the drug,
  and Im going to make money from it. Heinz then
  became desperate and broke into the store to
  steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have
  done that?

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Moral Development

• Level 1 Preconventional Morality
• Stage 1 Punishment-and-Obedience Orientation
• Goodness or badness depends on consequences of
  act bad acts are punished
• Stage 2 Naïve Hedonism
• Conform to rules to gain rewards

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Moral Development

• Level 2 Conventional Morality
• Stage 3 Good Boy or Good Girl Orientation
• Moral behavior pleases, helps, or is approved of
  by others
• Stage 4 Social-Order-Maintaining Morality
• Right conforms to legal authority rules maintain
  social order

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Moral Development

• Level 3 Postconventional (or Principled)
  Morality
• Stage 5 The Social-Contract Orientation
• Laws should express will of majority, and further
  human welfare if not, challenge them
• Stage 6 Morality of Individual Principles of
  Conscience
• Individual abstract moral guidelines that
  transcend laws
• Rare (a hypothetical construct)
• No longer measured

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Moral Development

• Support for Kohlbergs Theory
• Are Kohlbergs Stages an Invariant Sequence?
• Individuals do proceed through stages in order
• Stages are not skipped
• Stage 3 or 4 is highest level for most people

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Moral Development

• Criticisms of Kohlbergs Approach
• Issues with consistency
• Ecological validity
• Is Kohlbergs Theory Incomplete?
• Emphasizes moral reasoning, did not focus on
  moral affect or behavior
• Thought mature moral reasoning would lead to
  moral behavior
• Supported by research

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Moral Development

• Criticisms (cont)
• Limited scope
• Is Kohlbergs Theory Culturally Biased?
• Some aspects of moral development vary among
  societies
• Cultural beliefs define morality
• Is Kohlbergs Theory Gender Biased?
• Morality of justice for males, versus morality of
  caring for females
• Not supported by research

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Moral Development

• Criticisms (cont)
• Does Kohlberg Underestimate Young Children?
• Yes, as his focus was on legalistic concepts
• Did not examine distributive justice

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Moral Development

• Damon distributive justice rationales
• Level 0 (birth-5)
• Level 1 (5-6)
• Level 2 (6-7)
• Level 3 (8)