Moral Development

12 Key excerpts on "Moral Development"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Developmental and Educational Psychology for Teachers

  An applied approach

  • Dennis McInerney, David Putwain(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  From a cognitive psychological perspective, the process of development of moral concepts arises from children’s personal cognitive growth and experiences in the social world. The appreciation of the moral component of social experiences depends upon the cognitive level at which the child is functioning. It is in making sense of these social experiences that children perceive their salient moral aspects, for example pain or injustice, and generate ideas on how people should act towards each other. These moral rules are not based on given rules or adult influence but, rather, children construct their own judgments through abstractions from their experiences. As children grow older they re-evaluate existing concepts and construct new ones that are qualitatively different. Moral Development, therefore, presents an interplay between individual cognitive development and cognitive development within the social context.

  As caregivers, parents, and educators, we are intimately involved in the process of communicating values to children and adolescents. It is helpful to understand, therefore, the ways in which the development of the moral self is believed to occur. Widely differing conceptions exist of how we develop a sense of morality and whether morals are universal or culturally based and acquired through socialisation. In the following sections we look at the theories put forward by Piaget, Kohlberg, neo-Kohlbergians, Gilligan, and Turiel.

  QUESTION POINT

  Before we begin examining theories of Moral Development consider how you yourself developed a ‘moral self’. What are the components of your moral self? What were the primary influential factors in the development of your moral values? Are your moral values different from the moral values of other people. If so, what are the differences, and how did these develop? Is there a relationship between religious values and moral values? If so, how and why? If not, why?

  Jean Piaget’s stage theory of Moral Development

  The developmental theory of Piaget presents the view that increasingly sophisticated moral reasoning develops through an invariant sequence of stages. Piaget contends that all morality consists of a system of rules that is handed from adults to children. Through training, practice, and developing intellect, children learn to nurture respect for these standards of conduct (Carpendale, 2009; Piaget, 1965).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Routledge Handbook of Mass Media Ethics

  • Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians, Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians, Lee Wilkins, Clifford G. Christians(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4

  Moral Development

  A Psychological Approach to Understanding Moral Decision Making

  Renita Coleman and Lee Wilkins

  Introduction

  Research on Moral Development attempts to respond to the following question: how is it that people grow morally, and what influences the development of a moral life? Moral Development research makes some important assumptions that are seldom addressed in the literature but which are nonetheless central to it:

  • All human beings have the capacity for moral thinking.
  • Moral thinking is linked to experience. While philosophers have contributed enormously to a thoroughgoing analysis of the implications of choice within experience, no legitimate ethical theory divorces human action, and hence experience, from moral thinking, learning and growth.
  • Moral thinking can be both general and particular. There are general moral questions—is it right to lie or to kill—to which all human beings have a response. But, there are particular elaborations of moral questions—is it ever appropriate for a journalist to deceive a source who is attempting to deceive the journalist—to which professionals must respond within a particular context.

  This chapter will briefly review the general understandings of the field, place our research within that context, and then suggest potential paths for additional empirical and theoretical work.

  Theoretical Building Blocks

  The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget is considered the field’s founder in terms of both research results and approach. Piaget was particularly interested in how children put their cognitive worlds in order. He researched and wrote the book The Moral Judgment of the Child

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Moral Development

  Theory and Applications

  • Elizabeth C. Vozzola, Amie K. Senland(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Moral Development in the 21st Century: Theoretical Roots and New Directions Passage contains an image

  1 Introduction

  DOI: 10.4324/9780429295461-2

  Humans have been pondering questions of morality for as long as we have records of their queries. Meno asks Socrates, “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice;… [or] whether it comes to man by nature, or in what other way?” (Plato, 380 BCE). In the relatively recent field of psychology, cognitive developmentalists have developed one set of answers, and thinkers from behavioral, psychoanalytic, social learning, and evolutionary perspectives yet others.

  A second edition of this text was important because of the current paradigm shift of theory and research within the field. The earlier dominant constructionist paradigm has been challenged, and some believe, replaced, by theories from evolutionary, biological, personality, and cultural psychology. Many researchers no longer hold to classic universal theories and stress the need to look at morality through specific cultural lenses.

  For the purposes of this book, we use the term morality in the general language usage of principles of right and wrong actions and judgments. This book looks at a special area of morality, the field of Moral Development, in two ways: (1) changes across time and experience in how people understand right and wrong; as well as (2) individual differences in moral judgments, emotions, and actions. Some perspectives stress that principles of moral conduct are set by society, others that they are actively constructed by the developing child, and still others that there is a significant biological underpinning to our moral judgments, emotions, and behavior.

  Part I of this book explores not only the classic theories upon which the modern field of Moral Development rests, but also newer theories and directions that are rarely covered in traditional developmental textbooks. In Chapter 2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Handbook of Adolescent Development

  • Sandy Jackson, Luc Goossens, Sandy Jackson, Luc Goossens(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  7 Moral Development in adolescence: How to integrate personal and social values? Henri Lehalle

  Moral Development consists of progressive individual concern about social norms and social values. It comprises two aspects: a conceptual level including moral judgments and norms representation, and a pragmatic level regarding moral actions and commitment.

  Adolescence is a critical period of: (a) increasing social experience; (b) claiming personal thought; (c) elaborating identity choices especially about ideology (Alsaker & Kroger, this volume); and (d) constructing abstract cognitive skills (Lehalle, this volume). It follows that deep transformations and inter-individual differentiations should be commonly observed in moral domains.

  Following Piaget (1932), the cognitive-developmental approach to Moral Development was predominant in the 1960s and 1970s, especially from Kohlberg’s proposals (Kohlberg, 1969). This approach leads to several procedures aiming to evaluate moral judgments in the frame of some general developmental stages (first part of the chapter). However, the studies on Moral Development were increasingly concerned with the contextual intra-individual variability of judgments and with the effective differentiation that individuals may operate among social norms (second part). Furthermore, especially during adolescence, it is important, first, to consider individual differences in Moral Development, particularly with respect to issues such as sex differences and delinquency, and, second, to approach causal factors of personal differentiation and change (third part of the chapter). Finally, several open questions will be considered in the conclusion of this chapter.

  1. Assessment methods and general stages

  The cognitive-developmental perspective on morality states that people progress along several successive stages, depending on more accurate cognitive competencies constructed through social experiences and individual adaptation. Piaget (1932) initiated the description of moral stages based on individual judgments about socio-cognitive dilemmas. However, in this seminal book, Piaget was mainly concerned with Moral Development in childhood, not so much in adolescence. Therefore the Piagetian moral dilemmas used plausible events appearing in the daily experience of children during the 1930s. Nevertheless, Piaget was able to stress the main trend of Moral Development: from heteronomy (i.e., individuals conform to the norms that authority figures present) to autonomy

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Responsive Becoming: Moral Formation in Theological, Evolutionary, and Developmental Perspective

  • Angela Carpenter(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Here I will argue while that the current aversion to moral philosophy makes it difficult for moral psychology to propose an independent theory of Moral Development, the processes they describe are in fact amenable to a conversation with theology. There are, however, some stubborn points of tension. Within a framework that is restricted to natural explanations, the developmental literature describes a situation in which the conditions that children require for optimal Moral Development seem to exceed the capacities of ordinary caregivers. When reading studies of development one is struck by the extent to which ideals of conscientious parenting far exceed the standards of the “good-enough mother” famously set by Donald Winnicott. 3 A crucial question will thus be whether the natural processes uncovered in hundreds of developmental studies could ever conceivably be united in one human family or if, as with Horace Bushnell’s theory of nurture, developmental studies will ultimately only expose human limitation and incapacity. The human infant Although the ultimate target in exploring this material is to gain insight into early moral formation, this first section takes a step back to ask about the person who is being formed. The context in which a child grows matters immensely, but she is not a “blank slate.” Even in early infancy the child has, or is in the process of rapidly acquiring, a wide array of cognitive, social, and affective capacities, and much of the work now being done on children’s Moral Development takes these basic capacities, as well as their ontogenetic development, to be an important point of reference for understanding the moral behavior that becomes visible in childhood. For the present purposes I am going to consider infant capacities from three different perspectives, each of which will help to illuminate the foundation for later moral formation in childhood

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Handbook of Moral Behavior and Development

  Volume 1: Theory

  • William M. Kurtines, Jacob Gewirtz, Jacob L. Lamb, William M. Kurtines, Jacob Gewirtz, Jacob L. Lamb(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  Such a formulation has, in our view, not only important implications for the conceptualization of psychosocial development, but also for conceptualizing the nature of ontogenetic change in sociomoral knowledge and understanding. Such a view requires a conceptualization of ontogenetic change in sociomoral knowledge and understanding in competent rule users that differs in significant respects from theoretical orientations that conceptualize the ontogenesis of sociomoral understanding as a developmental process (i.e., the result of maturational or learning processes). For the past 3 decades, we noted earlier, the Moral Development literature, has been predominately defined by the same two theoretical traditions that have defined the human development literature, viz., the cognitive developmental approach (Kohlberg, 1976, 1981, 1984; Piaget, 1932/1965) and the behavioral-learning approach (Burton, 1984; Liebert, 1984; Mischel & Mischel, 1976). The cognitive developmental approach focuses on moral cognition (e.g., moral reasoning, moral judgment, etc.) as an outcome variable and uses maturational processes (e.g., developmental stage or sequence) as its primary process variables. The behavioral-learning approach, on the other hand, focuses on moral behavior (e.g., moral transgressions, aggressive behavior, etc.) as an outcome variable and relies on learning processes (e.g., conditioning, imitation, modeling, etc.) as primary process variables. Consistent with these theoretical traditions, we view the development of sociomoral competence (and other types of psychosocial competencies) to be the outcome of both maturational and learning processes

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Psychology of Human Social Development

  From Infancy to Adolescence

  • Sandie Taylor, Lance Workman(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  p.298

  Chapter 10 Contents Introduction Theories of Moral Development The influence of moral (i.e., prosocial) judgements on how we behave Summary

  p.299  

  Moral Development and prosocial behaviour

  10

  What this chapter will teach you

  •     Knowledge of the theoretical stage approaches to Moral Development of Piaget, Freud, Kohlberg and Eisenberg.

  •     Knowledge of other approaches such as that of Bandura, social constructivism and evolutionary psychology.

  •     From a social constructivism perspective, an understanding of the three domains of social knowledge: moral, conventional and personal.

  •     From an evolutionary psychology perspective, an understanding of how rules concerning our development of morality arose in our hominin ancestors in relation to reciprocity, devotion and deference.

  •     The positive relationship between the development of prosocial behaviour and moral emotional attributions.

  INTRODUCTION

  The word morality comes from the Latin moralis referring to custom. Custom is defined as a widely accepted way of behaving within society and is governed by set rules, beliefs, values, mores and attitudes. Specific rules or customs can become set in law through regulatory legislation, thereby enforcing a convention. This means that specific actions, such as driving a car on the wrong side of the road, are regulated in law and are punishable by the legal system. Within a social context, conventional behaviour is driven by implicit laws of custom. For example, when a person is speaking it is accepted that it is polite to listen and not to interrupt until they have finished. Most individuals within society conform to these rules and follow the set conventions regarding personal and social behaviour. There are, however, cross-cultural variations regarding these rules and some take the form of laws, taboos and religious tenets (Chasdi 1994).

  p.300

  Convention, however, contrasts with moral considerations that are intrinsic to the behaviours performed. Harming others as a consequence of our actions, for example, is a moral issue. Many moral issues are therefore not arbitrary nor are they determined by cultural precepts – although, as we have seen, legal conventions can derive from moral issues. Children therefore need to understand what constitutes moral behaviour

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Moral Development

  A Psychological Study of Moral Growth from Childhood to Adolescence

  • William Kay(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It can be seen that Havighurst and Taba argue implicitly for a developmental scheme of Moral Development, but it may be objected that the above analysis has been little more than a manipulation of terminology. A further comment shows that this criticism can be met.

  That this is a developmental scheme is clear from two chapters of this report. There it is argued that children should advance in their Moral Development. Now this does not mean that each personality type must become more morally adroit or ethically sophisticated. They must progress through the levels of Moral Development until they reach the personal or rational stage. This, it is presumed, will result from the influence of varying factors. Among these may be listed adult approval and disapproval; punishment and rewards; and verbal teaching. This use of different techniques has as its aim the accelerated progress of each child through the amoral and pre-moral stages to the moral stage. Thus they say: ‘As boys and girls grow up we expect them to formulate an increasingly conscious and rational code of conduct.’3

  When Havighurst and Taba conclude with their suggestions for moral education they further imply that it is the last stage in this sequential development which must be the goal for educational endeavour. They envisage the teacher’s task as one in which he encourages the intellectualization of values and moral experiences. ‘Thinking about moral experience leads to the formation of moral principles. Applying moral principles intelligently to the various situations of modern life requires practice under guidance—guidance such as an educational institution is best fitted to give. The school has the greatest opportunity to supplement moral habits with moral thinking.’1

  To support this developmental argument, one may turn to more evidence supplied by the work of the Committee on Human Development. Havighurst and Neugarton used data from Prairie City to make some comparisons with the development of Red Indian children. This showed moral growth continuing. Whereas the 1949 data indicated that the sixteen-year-old respondents in Prairie City, had yet to complete their Moral Development, the 1960 data of Peck and Havighurst revealed that many of them had done so. Thus it was concluded that the number of self-directive persons would grow still larger. In fact, they tabulated their expectation of a further development in moral responsibility2

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Values and Moral Development in Higher Education

  • Gerald Collier, John Wilson, Peter Tomlinson(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The range of topics with potential relevance to Moral Development and education is therefore large, as is illustrated, for instance, by the breadth of coverage offered in Derek Wright’s excellent book The Psychology of Moral Behaviour, 3 or the realisation that reference to such dense areas as the psychology of communication and that of interpersonal perception and social judgement may be indicated if one wishes to deal just with what John Wilson terms EMP. Nor can one pretend that there is at present any single general principle or framework allowing integration of these various areas of academic psychology; like a recent president of the British Psychological Society we are still very much in search of a psychology that will offer a unified – if complex – understanding of the individual in his real life setting. 4 However, there are some signs and hopes for the integration of hitherto disparate aspects of academic psychology, and it is upon a sample of these that this chapter will focus. Apart from restrictions on the length of such a piece, this limited attention is also dictated by the fact that a large proportion of psychological research concerning aspects of morals has been directed towards children, often in their early years: such studies tend to consider aspects which may be thought less important in the age-range receiving attention in this book. In addition, the models employed in these investigations, even if they may form a basis for recommendations in terms of particular child-rearing practices, may have little to offer that is at all feasible in the context of higher education today. This point may seem obvious to some readers, but the applications of stimulus-response psychology are in general restricted to policies of manipulation, the more extreme of them going ‘beyond freedom and dignity’, as Skinner’s title has it, to the objectives envisaged for the organisms under their charge

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Making Sense of Social Development

  • Dorothy Faulkner, Karen Littleton, Martin Woodhead(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The debates and criticisms generated in this area can be regarded as encapsulating in a microcosm the limitations of current developmental models. While the moral assumptions permeating models of Moral Development have attracted some critical attention, their exhibition within this arena should be understood as only one particular instance of what is a general problem. In this chapter the moral status of models of Moral Development is located within the broader cultural and political landscape within which developmental psychology functions. The remaining questions about whether developmental psychology can outgrow rather than simply process, mature and recycle the conservative and culture-bound presentations of early twentieth-century privileged men are complex. But a prerequisite for this is to understand what these theories are and do. Piaget's rules on children's games In The Moral Judgement of the Child (1932) Piaget describes his investigations of children's developing appreciation of morality. He conceived of morality as systems of rules, and his aim was to understand how we acquire these rules. In line with his paradoxical model of the child both as asocial and as party to insights that civilisation has knocked out of us, Piaget held that most of the moral rules we learn are imposed and enforced on us ready-made by adults. However, he saw in the ‘social games’ played by children the opportunity to see how these rules are constructed and interpreted by children

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Lawrence Kohlberg

  • Mark Woodward, Sohan Mogdil, Celia Mogdil(Authors)
  • 1986(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  But from Kohlberg’s point of view, the way in which moral meaning is constructed and truth (or moral correctness) is determined is exactly what we need to study psychologically. The assumption that how a piece of behaviour is conceptualized by a moral agent is crucial to the understanding of it as moral, and the assumption that the nature (form) of the justification given for a particular moral act can be separated from an external description of the act, are both core assumptions shared by moral philosophy and by moral psychology as construed by Kohlberg. 13 For Kohlberg, the psychological study of the child as moral agent necessitates viewing the ‘child as moral philosopher’. The second point of connection widens and extends the first: Kohlberg assumes that a psychologist seeking to understand the development of moral judgment in human subjects should use for conceptual tools the philosophically differentiated categories of such judgment: Moral judgments refer to moral meanings in the world —rules, laws, states of justice. Because of this, our basic terms for analysis come not from psychology but from philosophy and sociology. The basic moral terms reflect categories of moral experience, the dimensions shared by all moral experiences. They are in the realm of moral experience what the categories of space, time and causality are in the realm of physical experience

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Psychology and Ethical Development (Routledge Revivals)

  A Collection of Articles on Psychological Theories, Ethical Development and Human Understanding

  • R. S. Peters(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  22. See Hoffman, M. L., ‘Moral Development’, in Mussen, P. A., CarmichaeVs Manuel of Child Psychology (New York: Wiley, 1970), Vol. 2, pp. 329–330, 346.

  23. Ibid., pp. 302–303, 325.

  24. Ibid., p. 325.

  25. See Bernstein, B. B., ‘Social Class and Linguistic Development: a Theory of Social Learning’, in Halsey, A. H., Floud, J. and Anderson, C. A., Education, Economy and Society (New York: Free Press, 1961).

  26. See Bettelheim, B., ‘Moral Education’, in Sizer, N. F. and Sizer, T. R. (Eds), Moral Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), Ch. 7.

  27. See Hirst, P. H. and Peters, R. S., The Logic of Education (London: Routledge – Kegan Paul, 1970), Ch. 7.

  28. See Hoffman, op. cit., passim.

  29. Ibid., p. 325.

  30. Ibid., p. 340.

  31. See Turiel, E. ‘Developmental Processes in the Child’s Moral Thinking’ in Mussen, P. A., Langer, J. and Corington, M. (Eds) Trends and Issues in Developmental Psychology (New York: Holt, Rinehart, – Winston, 1969).

  32. For summary of some of the evidence see Bronfenbrenner, U., Two Worlds of Childhood (London: Allen – Unwin, 1971), pp. 124–143.

  33. Bronfenbrenner, op. cit., p. 95.

  *

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book