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A New Method for Studying Morality in Early Parent-Child Relations
Abstract
Twenty-four parents, mothers or fathers, of 3-5 year old children in a pre-school nursery kept diaries of problematic encounters within the family. Two of these encounters were later presented as 'pretend' stories to that child who made judgments of and emotionally reacted as if he/she were the story actor including giving reasons for complying. Encounters were coded into different domains (moral, social-conventional, prudential, etc.), and children's reactions compared across domains within each pair of encounters. Instead of the standard "right"/"wrong" question, the children were asked why they would/wouldn't commit the transgression again. All children said that they wouldn't do it again, but their reasons were more often congruent or consistent with the nature of prudential than of other kinds of transgressions, especially than moral transgressions. This suggests that while children may know "right from wrong," they do not see it as relevant to their moral behavior.
This paper reports young (3–5 year-olds’) children’s cognitive and affective understanding of actual moral (harm to others) and prudential (harm to self) transgressions in the family, as reported by the parent, but in a way that provides the child the opportunity to reflect on and reason about the actual events. A total of 38 parent–child dyads participated. Findings illuminate different levels of moral understanding during preschool years. Specifically, there was a sharp break between the understanding of 3 and 4–5 year-olds for both transgressions. However, across all age groups, the rate of increased relevance of the reasoning to the act was greater for prudential than for moral transgressions, and the understanding of own feelings as an agent of the transgression developed more slowly in the moral than the prudential domains. Unexpectedly, many 3 year-olds failed to understand the dangers inherent in prudential transgressions.
As theories of developmental psychology continue to define educational goals and practice, it has become imperative for educators and researchers to scrutinize not only the underlying assumptions of such theories but also the model of adulthood toward which they point. Carol Gilligan examines the limitations of several theories, most notably Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development, and concludes that developmental theory has not given adequate expression to the concerns and experience of women. Through a review of psychological and literary sources, she illustrates the feminine construction of reality. From her own research data, interviews with women contemplating abortion, she then derives an alternative sequence for the development of women's moral judgments. Finally, she argues for an expanded conception of adulthood that would result from the integration of the “feminine voice” into developmental theory.
This study examined toddlers' naturally occurring moral and conventional transgressions in the home. Toddlers (
N = 36), divided between boys and girls at 24 and 36 months of age, were videotaped in two 45-min sessions, one with mothers and one with mothers and familiar peers. Responses to moral and conventional transgressions were coded from the videotapes. Moral transgressions were more frequent in the peer session, whereas conventional transgressions were more frequent when children were alone with mothers. Mothers' responses to conventional transgressions focused on social order and social regulation, whereas maternal and child responses to moral transgressions focused the transgressor on the consequences of the acts for others' rights or welfare. Mothers' affective responses to moral and conventional transgressions did not differ but were more negative than toddlers' responses. Conventional transgressions increased with age, whereas girls' (but not boys') moral transgressions decreased with age. Sequential analyses suggested that this latter finding might be due to mothers' differential responses to girls' and boys' moral transgressions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Maltreated and nonmaltreated preschoolers' (mean age = 4 years 6 months) judgments regarding hypothetical and actual moral transgressions were examined. Thirty-six maltreated children (17 physically abused and 19 neglected) and 19 comparison nonmaltreated children judged, justified, and evaluated affective responses to 6 hypothetical moral transgressions. Perpetrators and victims also judged and evaluated affective responses to actual classroom moral transgressions. All children evaluated moral transgressions as very serious, punishable, and wrong in the absence of rules. Moral judgments and justifications differed as a function of context (hypothetical vs actual) and type of transgression but not maltreatment status. Affective responses differed as a function of maltreatment subtype and gender. Maltreated and nonmaltreated children may differ in the organization of their affective responses rather than in their moral evaluations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
J. E. Grusec and J. J. Goodnow (see record
1994-25033-001) offered a new comprehensive reformulation of discipline encounters as context for children's internalization of parental views. They focused mainly on children's social information processing and how it affects perception and acceptance of parental messages. The model seems best suited for middle childhood and adolescence. This commentary suggests additional directions in research on internalization in early childhood. It is argued that processes such as social referencing, sensitivity to standard violations, emergence of self, emotional reactions to wrongdoing, early self-conscious emotions, and self-regulation may be important antecedents and signs of internalization in the 1st 3 yrs of life. The proposed shift from cognitive to affective and self-regulatory aspects of early conscience reveals children's temperament as an important but neglected contributor to early moral development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Bruner, in reassessing the cognitive revolution, argues for the centrality of ‘meaning-making’ in human activity, claiming that children learn to give meaning to what people do as they learn the language and social practices of their culture. The role played by the attribution of mental states to others has been studied intensely in the past decade in a new research area that has come to be known as children’s ‘theory of mind’. Researchers in this field who, unlike Bruner, see psychology as a natural empirical science, view the child as constructing a causal theory to explain and predict human action. They base their arguments largely on experimental observation of children’s performance in laboratory tasks, especially the ‘false-belief’ task. In contrast, many researchers who take Bruner’s view study the development of social understanding in naturalistic observation of children’s interaction with peers and family members. In this article we examine the relations between these views and suggest that the real challenge of the cognitive revolution is to unite the two approaches, to achieve a causal, naturalistic account of the acquisition and elaboration of meaning-making.
Developmental trajectories and individual differences in 70 American middle-income 2½- to 4-year olds' moral judgments were examined 3 times across 1 year using latent growth modeling. At Wave 1, children distinguished hypothetical moral from conventional transgressions on all criteria, but only older preschoolers did so when rating deserved punishment. Children's understanding of moral transgressions as wrong independent of authority grew over time. Greater surgency and effortful control were both associated with a better understanding of moral generalizability. Children higher in effortful control also grew more slowly in understanding that moral rules are not alterable and that moral transgressions are wrong independent of rules. Girls demonstrated sharper increases across time than boys in understanding the nonalterability of moral rules.
Associations between young children's developing theory of mind (ToM) and judgments of prototypical moral transgressions were examined 3 times across 1 year in 70 American middle class 2.5- to 4-year-olds. Separate path models controlling for cross-time stability in judgments, within-time associations, and children's age at Wave 1 indicated that across both 6-month intervals, children who evaluated moral acts as more wrong independent of authority had more mature ToM 6 months later; in addition, judgments of moral transgressions as less permissible at Wave 2 also led to more advanced ToM at Wave 3. Children with more advanced ToM judged that moral rules are more alterable, however, and rated moral transgressions as less deserving of punishment. Finally, more advanced ToM initially led to evaluations of moral transgressions as less independent of rules and then to judgments of moral transgressions as more independent of rules. During the preschool years, early moral judgments and theory of mind appear to develop as reciprocal, bidirectional processes.
Preschool children's social interactions with teachers and peers were observed in the context of moral and prudential events. Twenty groups of children were observed during free play for a total of 164 hours (8 hours per each group). Four types of moral transgressions were observed: physical harm, psychological harm, property loss, and property damage. The majority of the moral transgressions pertained to physical harm and property loss. There were equal frequencies of both moral and prudential physical harm acts; Moral physical harm acts resulted in actual harm; whereas, prudential acts were only potentially harmful. Teachers responded differently to moral and prudential rule violations. Gender differences were noted with regard to instigator, victim teachers' responses, and victims' responses.
Preschool (M age = 4–11) and fifth-grade (M age = 12–1) children and their mothers judged the acceptability of corporal punishment as a function of the type of transgression (dangerous, violation of social rule, or violation of moral precept) and discipline agent. Children of both ages and their mothers discriminated among different types of transgressions as a function of rule contingency, rule generalizability, and seriousness of the transgression. Social convention transgressions were judged to be more rule contingent, less generalizable (across settings), and less serious than prudential (dangerous) or moral violations, but overall children judged transgressions to be more generalizable than did their mothers. Preschool children showed broad acceptability for severe corporal punishment given any type of transgression, by any agent, whereas fifth graders were generally discriminating about limits of punishability, and their judgments appeared to be transitional between the broad acceptance shown by younger children and more focused acceptability shown by mothers. Mothers were proprietary with respect to agent and tended to focus on dangerous and moral violations as punishable. Findings suggest a developmental path from a single criterion for young children to consideration of multiple criteria for older children and adults. Judgments were also interpreted as reflecting social roles such as parents' responsibility to constrain children and children's expectations for constraint. Preschool children's broad acceptability of punishment despite their differentiation of classes of rules and of transgressions suggests that different constraints operate for judgments about rules or commands as opposed to sanctions. Implications for children's ability to identify and report abuse are also noted.
Even young children show considerable cultural competence in their accusations and excuses, and can differentiate among various types of rules.
Two studies examined preschool teacher and child interactions regarding personal, moral, and social-conventional issues in the classroom and the development of personal concepts in young children. In Study 1, 20 preschool classrooms, 10 with 3-year-olds and 10 with 4-year-olds, were observed to assess children's and teachers' interactions regarding personal, moral, social-conventional, and mixed events. Teachers used more direct messages regarding moral and social-conventional events than personal and mixed events. Teachers offered children choices, but they rarely negotiated personal events with children. Children responded with personal choice assertions when adults offered them choices, but adults did not differ in the frequency that they negated or affirmed children's assertions of personal choice. In Study 2, 120 preschool children, nearly evenly divided between males and females at 3, 4, and 5 years of age, were interviewed regarding their conceptions of personal events in the classroom and home. With age, children judged that they should retain control over personal decisions in both contexts. In both judgments and social interactions, teachers and children identified a personal domain in which children can and should make choices about how to structure their activities and assert their independence in the classroom.
This study examines whether German and Portuguese 5- to 6-, and 8- to 9-year-old children distinguish between the feelings attributed to a victimizer or to themselves if they were the victimizers in two hypothetical moral violations (stealing and breaking a promise), and how they morally evaluate the emotions they attribute to victimizers and the person of the victimizer. The results showed that in spite of some developmental and cultural differences, children's attribution of negative emotions was substantively more frequent when they made attributions to themselves. Furthermore, most children judged the positive (immoral) emotions they had attributed to victimizers as not right and evaluated the person of the hypothetical victimizer negatively. The results clarify contradictory findings in the field and may provide a better understanding of the moral and developmental meaning of the positive and negative emotions attributed in acts of victimization.
This paper presents a general statistical methodology for the analysis of multivariate categorical data arising from observer reliability studies. The procedure essentially involves the construction of functions of the observed proportions which are directed at the extent to which the observers agree among themselves and the construction of test statistics for hypotheses involving these functions. Tests for interobserver bias are presented in terms of first-order marginal homogeneity and measures of interobserver agreement are developed as generalized kappa-type statistics. These procedures are illustrated with a clinical diagnosis example from the epidemiological literature.
Sixty-one Chinese preschoolers from Hong Kong at 2 ages (Ms = 4.36 and 6.00 years) were interviewed about familiar moral, social-conventional, and personal events. Children treated personal events as distinct from moral obligations and conventional regulations. Children judged the child as deciding personal issues, based on personal choice justifications, whereas children judged parents as deciding moral and conventional issues. With age, children granted increased decision-making power to the child. In contrast, children viewed moral transgressions as more serious, generalizably wrong, and wrong independent of authority than other events, based on welfare and fairness. Punishment-avoidance justifications for conventional events decreased with age, whereas conventional justifications increased. Young Chinese preschool children make increasingly differentiated judgments about their social world.
A new taxonomy of real-life dilemmas was tested in two studies. In Study 1, 35 respondents assessed six types of real-life dilemmas in terms of socio-cognitive conflict. Support was found for a classification of dilemmas into three levels of socio-cognitive conflict. In Study 2, 191 young women responded to measures of social perspective-taking and emotional empathy and reported a real-life moral dilemma as well as their feelings while making decisions about it. The dilemmas were classified into personal and impersonal and into three levels of socio-cognitive conflict. Dependent variables were the integrative complexity of the arguments and the reported feelings (sympathy, upset, and remorse). Dispositional empathy and perspective taking predicted level of socio-cognitive conflict and feelings of sympathy but not integrative complexity. Personal dilemmas aroused more feelings of upset than did impersonal ones. Low socio-cognitive conflict dilemmas evoked less complex thinking and less intensive feelings of upset and sympathy than did moderate and high socio-cognitive conflict dilemmas.
Preschool children’s judgments about hypothetical and actual transgressions
- Smetana
Child reading and children’s prosocial initiations toward victims of distress
- Zahn-Waxler
Mothers’ and children’s conceptualization of corporal punishment
- Catron