Chapter 14: Aggression, Altruism, and Moral Development

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Chapter 14 Aggression, Altruism, and Moral
Development

• Dr. Pelaez

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Development of Aggression

• Aggressive Acts are divided into two categories
• Hostile Aggression- Aggressive acts which mainly
  focuses on purposely harming or injuring another
  individual.
• Instrumental Aggression- Aggressive acts which
  mainly focus on gaining access to objects, space
  and privileges.
• Example A boy who hits and teases his sister and
  then continues to tease her for crying. This can
  be defined as hostile aggression.
• The boy can act further by taking away a toy
  that his sister was playing with after hitting
  her. This would be defined as instrumental
  aggression. There can be a bidirectional
  relationship.

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Developmental Trends

• Signs of instrumental aggression begin to show at
  the end of the 1st year of life.
• Goodenough (1931) found that unfocused temper
  tantrums become less common between the ages of 2
  and 3, as children begin to physically retaliate
  when frustrated or attacked by playmates.
• Goodenough (1931) also found that physical
  aggression declines and makes way for verbal
  forms of aggression (teasing, tattling,
  name-calling) between the ages of 3 and 5.

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Developmental Trends (cont.)

• Adolescents show less overtly aggressive
  behavior, but may turn to other forms of
  antisocial behavior.
• Relational Aggression acts such as snubbing,
  withdrawing acceptance, or spreading rumors that
  are aimed at damaging an adversarys self-esteem,
  friendships, or social status.
• Relational aggression in girls becomes more
  subtle and malicious during adolescence.
• Boys are more likely to express their aggression
  through acts like theft, truancy, substance
  abuse, and sexual misconduct

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Developmental Trends

• Sex Differences
• Boys have higher levels of sex hormones-testostero
  ne.
• By preschool, aggression was viewed to be a male
  attribute in their gender schemas. (Watson
  Peng, 1992).
• Researchers focus more on overt rather than
  covert behaviors.

• Social Learning
• Aggressiveness is not a stable attribute.
• Aside from genetic predispositions, some children
  will remain highly aggressive due to their social
  environment and maintain aggressive habits.
• Only a small percentage become chronically
  aggressive.

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Individual Differences in Aggressive Behavior

• Proactive Aggressors
• Confident that aggression will result in tangible
  benefits.
• Believe that self esteem will be enhanced by
  being the dominant one over other children.
• Use of instrumental strategies to obtain and
  achieve personal goals

• Reactive Aggressors
• Display high levels of retaliatory aggression.
• Are suspicious and cautious of other individuals.
• Believe others who are dominated deserve to be
  dominated.

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Is Aggressiveness a Stable Attribute?

• An international longitudinal study by Cummings
  et al. (1989) found that the amount of moody,
  ill-tempered, and aggressive behavior that
  children display between 3 and 10 is a fairly
  good predictor of their aggressive or other
  antisocial inclinations later in life.
• Children who genetically predisposed to be
  temperamentally irritable may remain relatively
  aggressive over time because they regularly evoke
  negative reactions, which may foster aggressive
  responses.
• Other children may remain highly aggressive
  because they are raised in home environments that
  nurture and maintain aggressive habits.

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Social Information Processing Theory

• Kenneth Dodge (1986) created this model to
  display how children prefer aggressive or non
  aggressive resolutions to social problems.
• Six stages in Social Information Processing
  Theory
• Encode Social Cues- what is the harm doer's
  reaction?
• Interpret Social Cues- Meaning behind the action.
• Formulate Social Goals- resolve situation.
• Generate Problem Solving- Strategies to achieve
  goals.
• Evaluate Strategies- Were goals achieved?
• Enact a response- child responds to situation.

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Dodges Social-Information Processing Model

• Steps children take when deciding how to respond
  to harmdoing.

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Victims of Peer Aggression

• Passive Children
• Socially withdrawn
• Sedentary
• Physically weak
• Reluctant to fight back
• Do not defend themselves.
• Invite hostilities by not acting.

• Proactive Children
• Oppositional
• Restless
• High tempered
• Inclined to fight back to aggressors
• Involved in various fighting situations.

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Perpetrators of Peer Aggression

• Olweus (1984, 1993) found that 10 percent of his
  adolescent sample could be described as habitual
  bullies who physically and verbally harassed
  another 10 percent of the sample on a regular
  basis.
• Rates are higher in younger children.
• Habitual bullies have often observed adult
  conflict and aggression at home, but have rarely
  been the target of aggression. They have learned
  that aggression pays off for the perpetrator.
• Bullies appear to harass their victims for
  personal or instrumental reasons are usually
  classified as proactive aggressors.

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Cultural and Subcultural Influences on Aggression

• Some cultures and ethnicities are found to be
  much more violent and aggressive than others.
• Gebusi of Papua New Guinea
• Teach children to be fierce and competitive and
  unresponsive to the needs of other individuals
• In relations to crime, 50 of murder is higher
  than any other industrialized nation.
• Compared to the U.S. the incidence of rape,
  homicide and assault are the second highest in
  the nation.
• Studies in the U.S. and U.K. found social-class
  differences in aggression Youth from lower SES,
  particularly males from urban areas, exhibit more
  aggressive behavior and higher levels of
  delinquency than their peers in the middle class.
  

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Socioeconomic Class

• Children from low SES usually in urban areas tend
  to exhibit more aggressive behavior and high
  levels of delinquent acts.
• Parents with low income have found to use
  physical punishment styles to discipline
  aggression, therefore modeling aggression rather
  than suppressing it.
• Parents with low SES live stressful and difficult
  lifestyles making parental monitoring difficult.
  

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Coercive Home Environments Breeding Grounds
for Aggression and Delinquency

• Families as Social Systems
• Patterson (1982) observed that highly aggressive
  children live in atypical family environments he
  termed coercive home environments homes in
  which family members often annoy one another and
  use aggressive or otherwise antisocial tactics as
  a method of coping with aversive experiences.
• Negative reinforcement is important in
  maintaining the coercive interactions.
• The flow of influence is multidirectional, with
  coercive interactions affecting the behavior of
  all parties and contributing to the hostile
  family environment.

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Coercive Home Environments as Contributors to
Chronic Delinquency

• Preschool Years
• Develop hostile attribution biases
• Defiant
• Aggressive behavior
• General lack of self resistance

• Pre-Adolescence
• Rejection by school peers
• Criticized by teachers
• Poor academics
• Poor attendance
• Exposure to other deviant groups

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A Model of the Development of Chronic Antisocial
Behavior

• Adapted from Patterson, DeBaryshe, Ramsey, 1989.

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Developmental Paths

• Boys are more likely than girls fall into
  delinquency, but recently the gap is narrowing.
• Delinquent girls are more likely to engage in
  prostitution and running away, but equally as
  likely as boys to be involved in larcenies,
  substance abuse, and sexual misconduct.
• Delinquency Legacy Antisocial male adolescents
  tend to pair up with antisocial females and have
  children at an earlier age. These couples expose
  their children to the same kind of coercive home
  environment that fostered their own delinquency

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Developmental Paths

• Family interventions are effective for modifying
  antisocial behaviors.
• Useful interventions consist of
• Parenting skills for effective child management
  techniques
• Fostering social skills in children to prevent
  from rejection by peers.
• Providing academic remediation to keep children
  on grade level.

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Methods of Controlling Aggression Antisocial
Conduct

• Non-aggressive Environments
• Play areas to minimize conflict
• Provide space for vigorous play to avoid
  accidents
• Payoffs for Aggression
• Decrease incidence of proactive aggression by
  identifying and eliminating reinforcing
  consequences.

• Proven Methods
• Incompatible response technique-ignoring
  undesirable conduct while reinforcing acts
  unrelated to these conducts.
• Time out Technique-discipline for misbehaving
  children in which they are removed from a setting
  until they are able to act appropriately.

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Social Cognitive Interventions

• Highly-reactive, aggressive children can benefit
  from social cognitive interventions.
• Looking for non-hostile cues associated with harm
  doing.
• Control anger
• Generate non-aggressive solutions to conflict.

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Preventing Violence at School

• School faculty and counselor take measures in the
  school environment
• To decrease aggressive acts amongst children.
• Focus on
• Minimizing rewards for aggression
• Replacing aggression with pro-social responses
• Helping students control their emotions
• Understand feelings and intentions
• Seek non-aggressive solutions to conflict

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Origins of Altruism

• Altruism a selfless concern for the welfare of
  others that is expressed through pro-social acts
  such as sharing, cooperating, and helping.
• Toddlers are capable of being compassionate
  towards their companions.
• Individual differences in early compassion depend
  on temperamental variations and parents
  reactions to the child harming another child
• More compassionate toddlers have parents who
  discipline harm doing with affective explanations
  (focuses attention on harm or distress the child
  has caused) that foster sympathy.

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Altruism Individual Differences

• Childrens early compassion depends heavily on
• Behaviors children view amongst parents.
• Example Mothers of uncompassionate toddlers use
  coercive tactics
• (verbal consequences or physical punishment)
  to discipline undesirable
• behaviors.

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Developmental Trends in Altruism

• Spontaneous self sacrifice, in terms of sharing
  and helping, are relatively infrequent amongst
  toddlers.
• Unless instructed by an adult or threatened by a
  peer, these behaviors are unlikely.
• This involuntary acts of compassion improve as
  toddlers enter the preschool age.

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Social-Cognitive and Affective Contributors to
Altruism

• 2 important contributors to the development of
  altruistic behavior
• 1. Pro-social moral reasoning the thinking
  that people display when deciding whether to
  help, share with, or comfort others when these
  actions could prove costly to themselves.
• - Eisenbergs level of pro-social moral
  reasoning in children and adolescents predicts
  future altruism.

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Social-Cognitive and Affective Contributors to
Altruism (cont.)

• Empathy persons ability to experience the
  emotions of other people.
• - Childrens interpretation of their own
  empathic arousal as concern for distressed others
  (sympathetic empathic arousal vs. self-oriented
  distress) should eventually come to promote
  altruism.
• -Social-cognitive development must take place
  for true empathy to develop.

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Eisenbergs Levels of Pro-social Moral Reasoning

• Hedonistic
• Needs Oriented
• Stereotyped, approval oriented
• Empathic orientation
• Internalized values orientation

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Social-Cognitive Affective Contributors to
Altruism
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Social-Cognitive Affective Contributors to
Altruism

• Preschoolers
• More geared towards concern
• for themselves self serving.

• Adolescence
• Become increasingly responsive to the
• needs wishes and concerns of other individuals
• Less self centered.
• EX helping someone they may dislike

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Age Trends Empathy-Altruism Relationship

• Empathy can be better measured by the age of the
  child.
• Studies have shown children appeared empathetic
  by expressing feelings about misfortunes of
  storybook characters.
• Younger children lack role taking skills and
  insight about their personal emotions in order to
  understand
• Why others feel and act distressed
• Why other are feeling aroused due to the
  distress.

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How Empathy Promotes Altruism A Felt
Responsibility Interpretation

• Felt-Responsibility Hypothesis the theory that
  empathy may promote altruism by causing one to
  reflect on altruistic norms and thus to feel some
  obligation to help distressed others.

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Cultural and Social Influences on Altruism

• Most Altruistic
• Less industrialized societies
• Large families
• Children contribute to family matters
• Suppressed individualism

• Less Altruistic
• Western Culture competition of individual rather
  than group goals
• Few responsibilities in family
• Lack of self care routines

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Cultural Social Influences on Altruism
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Reinforcing Altruism

• Likable and respected adults can promote
  childrens pro-social behavior by verbally
  reinforcing their acts of kindness.
• Children who are offered tangible rewards for
  their pro-social acts are not especially
  altruistic because they attribute their kind acts
  to a desire to earn incentives, rather than to a
  concern for others welfare and are less likely
  to make sacrifices for others when the rewards
  stop.
• Children who observe helpful models become more
  helpful themselves, especially if the model has a
  warm relationship with the child, provides a
  compelling rationale, and regularly practices
  what he preaches

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Who raises altruistic children?

• Studies of unusually charitable adults indicate
  they have enjoyed a warm and affectionate
  relationship with parents who themselves were
  highly concerned with the welfare of others.
• Parental reactions to a childs harm doing also
  play an important role in the development of
  altruism.

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What is Morality?

• These are principals or ideas that help
  individuals decipher right from wrong actions. A
  condition of feeling pride vs. guilt or
  unpleasant emotions
• As individuals grow older altruism is
  internalized- shifting from externally controlled
  actions to governing internal standards and
  principles

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How Developmentalists Look at Morality

• Research has centered on 3 moral components
• Affective Component the feelings that surround
  right or wrong actions and that motivate moral
  thoughts or actions.
• Cognitive Component the way we conceptualize
  right and wrong and make decisions about how to
  behave.
• Behavioral Component how we actually behave
  when we experience the temptation to lie, cheat,
  or violate other moral views.
• All contemporary theorists consider
  internalization to be a crucial milestone along
  the road to moral maturity.

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Freud Development of the Conscience

• Emphasized moral affect.
• Freuds theory of oedipal mortality children
  internalize the moral standards of the same-sex
  parent during the phallic stage as they resolve
  their Oedipus or Electra complex and form a
  conscience or superego.
• Toddlers in securely attached relationships have
  mutually responsive relationships with their
  parents.
• These toddlers are likely to display committed
  compliance in which they
• Are highly motivated to embrace parents agenda
  and comply with rules.
• Are sensitive to a parents emotional signals and
  judge if they have done right or wrong.
• Are beginning to internalize parental reactions
  in response to their achievements and changes.
  This leads them to experience shame, guilt or
  pride.

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Cognitive-Developmental Theory The Child as
Moral Philosopher

• Cognitive-developmentalists chart the moral
  reasoning that children display.
• Believe that children progress through invariant
  stages, each of which evolves from and replaces
  its predecessor.
• Believe that cognitive development and relevant
  social experiences underlie the growth of moral
  reasoning.
• Two major theorists
• Jean Piaget Lawrence Kohlberg

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Piagets Theory of Moral Development

• 1. The Premoral Period The first 5 years of
  life, when children are said to have little
  respect for or awareness of socially defined
  rules.
• 2. Heteronomous Morality The 1st stage of
  moral development in which children view the
  rules of authority figures as sacred and
  unalterable.
• 3. Autonomous Morality The 2nd stage of moral
  development, in which children realize that rules
  are arbitrary agreements that can be challenged
  and changed with the consent of the people they
  govern.

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Piagets Model Continued

• Two factors play a role in the transition from
  heteronomous to autonomous morality
• (1) cognitive maturation
• decline in egocentrism
• development of role-taking skills
• (2) social experience
• equal-status contact with peers
• lessens the childs respect for adult authority
• increases self-respect and respect for peers
• illustrates that rules are arbitrary agreements.
• Critics have argued that Piagets theory
  underestimates the moral capacities of preschool
  and grade-school children.

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Kohlbergs Theory of Moral Development

• Revised and extended Piagets theory.
• As children mature, they are faced with solving
  moral dilemmas.
• Obeying rule or authority figure
• Taking some action that conflicted with rules and
  commands while serving human needs.

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Kohlbergs Theory Level 1- Pre-conventional
Morality

• Kohlberg believed in the levels of morality that
  consisted of six stages
• Level 1 Pre-conventional Morality- moral
  judgments are based on tangible punitive
  consequences (stage 1) or rewarding consequences
  (stage 2)
• Stage 1 Punishment Obedience Training- The
  goodness and badness of an act all depends on the
  consequences.
• Stage 2 Naïve Hedonism- individual conforms to
  rules in order to gain rewards or satisfy
  personal goals.

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Kohlbergs Theory Level 2 Conventional
Morality

• Level 2 Conventional Morality Individual
  strives to obey rules and social norms to win
  others approval or to maintain social order.
• Stage 3 Good boy or Good girl Orientation-
  Moral behavior which is perceived to please, aid
  and assist others.
• Stage 4 Social-Order Maintaining Morality-
  individual considers perspectives that are
  generalized by others. The will of society will
  be reflected by the law.

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Kohlbergs Theory Level 3 Post-conventional
Morality

• Level 3 Post conventional Morality- Moral
  judgments are based on social contracts and
  democratic law (stage 5) or on universal
  principles of ethics and justice (stage 6).
• Stage 5 The Social Contract Orientation-
  Individual sees the laws as tools for expressing
  the will of the majority of human welfare.
• Stage 6 Morality of Individual Principles of
  Conscience- individual defines right and wrong on
  the basis of the self chosen ethical principles
  of his or her conscience.

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Support for Kohlbergs Theory

• Longitudinal research conducted by Colby et al.
  (1983) on Kohlbergs original research
  participants found that the moral stages do form
  an invariant sequence.
• The need for cognitive development has also found
  support in the literature (Walker, 1980
  Tomlinson-Keasey Keasey, 1974, etc.).
• Research has also shown that social-experience
  that occurs with peers, in advanced education
  settings, and in diverse, democratic societies
  contributes to moral development.

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Are Kohlbergs Stages an Invariant Sequence?

• Adapted from Colby et al. (1983)

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Morality Product of Social Learning and Social
Information Processing

• Hartshorne May (1928- 1930), conducted
  longitudinal study on moral character of
  children.
• Found children were inconsistent in their moral
  behavior
• Ex Childs willingness to cheat in one scenario
  did little prediction that the child would lie,
  cheat or steal in other scenarios.

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Criticisms of Kohlbergs Approach

• Theory may be culturally biased in that
  post-conventional morality does not exist in some
  societies. Critics claim that the theorys
  highest stages reflect a Western ideal of justice
  and does not account for the values of
  collectivist societies.
• Gilligan (1982, 1993) argues that the theory
  does not adequately represent female moral
  reasoning (morality of justice vs. morality of
  care).
• Another common criticism is that the theory
  focuses too much on moral reasoning and neglects
  moral affect and behavior.
• The theory also underestimates the moral
  reasoning of young children.

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Morality as a Product of Social Learning (and
Social Information Processing)

• Social learning theorists claim that moral
  behaviors are learned in the same way that other
  social behaviors are through the operation of
  reinforcement and punishment and through
  observational learning.
• Among the factors that promote the development of
  inhibitory controls are praise given for virtuous
  conduct, punishments that include appropriate
  rationales, and exposing children to (or having
  them serve as) models of moral restraint.
• Moral self-concept training is an effective
  alternative to punishment as a means of
  establishing inhibitory controls

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Who Raises Morally Mature Children?

• Martin Hoffman (1970) measured different
  parenting style approaches to see which was most
  effective in moral development.
• Neither love withdrawal or power assertion were
  effective at promoting moral maturity
• Induction seemed to foster development of all
  three aspects of morality-moral emotions, moral
  reasoning and moral behavior.
• Parents who rely on inductive discipline tend to
  have children who are morally mature
• Reason based discipline can be highly effective
  with 2 to 5 year olds, by reliably teaching them
  sympathy and compassion for others.

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Childs Eye View on Discipline

• Siegel Cowen (1984) asked children
  adolescents ( 4-18 year olds) to evaluate
  disciplining strategies.
• Five types of transgressions were presented
• Simple disobedience
• Causing physical harm to others
• Causing physical harm to oneself
• Causing psychological harm to others
• Causing physical damage
• Responses, from all participants, favored the
  preferred method to use was induction techniques.