As infants develop and become more able to analyze what is going on around them, they even have the ability to recognize when a person in their environment is treating another person badly. At a young age, infants are quickly able to figure out whether the consequence of a behavior is good or bad, suggesting that their genes are involved and that experience and learning are not the only causes of moral development.
By 12 months of age, infants begin to understand the concept of fairness. When these infants witness cookies being shared, they expect an equal number of cookies to be given to all of the people involved.
Taken together, evidence from these laboratory studies tells us that children under the age of 2 have a very good understanding of which actions will benefit others.
However, as children get older, the expression of their morality changes. For example, while infants seem to see fairness as equality everyone should get the same number of cookies, for example , teenagers tend to prefer giving more resources to those who do not have any already or to those who worked harder.
Thus, these early tendencies in infancy are considered to be the foundation for, but not the exact same as, adult morality. Our concepts of morality are built from the combination of emotions, motivations, and our increasing level of mental understanding as we develop. Our understanding of the role of the brain in morality is largely based on the three different methods. The first is the study of people with brain lesions, meaning individuals who have had an area of the brain removed in surgery or have experienced an injury to a certain area in an accident [ 4 ].
Neuroscientists scientists who study the brain and nervous system examine how moral behaviors change in these people. Another way to understand the role the brain plays in morality is to use MRI scanners or electrophysiology EEG to image the brain as it functions. In these experiments, neuroscientists presented children and adults with moral tasks or activities and looked at which regions of the brain were activated while the participants performed these activities.
Finally, chemicals in the brain can also be explored to see if they might play a role in moral behaviors see Box 1. Several chemicals produced in the brain, called neuromodulators, influence morality.
The hormone, oxytocin, though wrongly called the moral molecule, has received a lot of attention and hype. In humans, oxytocin does increase trust and generosity in some situations but can increase envy and bias in others. What is really interesting from an evolutionary perspective is that this is a very ancient molecule that, across mammalian species, plays a critical role in the mother—child relationship by increasing bonding and reducing fear and anxiety.
Another neuromodulator, serotonin, is involved in social behaviors, particularly aggression, and is manufactured in the brain and the intestines.
Serotonin has been shown to influence moral judgment by enhancing the negative feelings we have in response to see others experience harm. To determine which parts of the brain are involved in moral decisions, neuroscientists designed an experiment in which people have their brains imaged as they are performing tasks related to morality.
For example, they were shown pictures or asked to read stories about situations that would usually be considered right or wrong, such as a story in which someone is hurt for no reason, or they were asked to make a difficult decision, such as whether they would steal a drug at a pharmacy to save the life of a sick child. These studies show that specific regions of the brain are responsible for morality and moral decision-making Figure 1 ; Box 2.
Other studies with children have also taught us about the parts of the brain that play a role in morality. These children were shown videos of cartoon characters either pushing and shoving others bad or comforting and sharing with others good. However, most moral judgments require both a rapid, automatic reaction guided by an emotional response, and a more slower reasoning capacity.
Instead, various regions and circuits of the brain that are associated with emotion, planning, problem solving, understanding others, and social behavior are recruited when making moral judgments. And this is not simply because they provide food for reflective thought. Rather, at a deeper level, they may help initiate or exacerbate existing cognitive disequilibrium. If teachers are not somehow urging and testing for such confusion and anxiety—for disequilibrated rather than equilibrated writing—they are likely falling short in enhancing fundamental student understanding.
Many instructors likely will recognize the above phenomena in their teaching, finding this picture of them part-illuminating, part-affirming. Most ethics instructors are struck by their ability to uncover commonsense Aristotles, John Stuart Mills, Kants, Humes and Lockes in their classroom, merely by posing moral questions.
Moral development findings provide a deep and systematic partial explanation of this phenomenon. Other who seem to get things wrong often are actually grappling at a much deeper level with the views.
And most instructors can tell when some lectures or class discussions have no hope of getting anywhere. William Perry offers a quasi-developmental account of meta-cognitive thinking in the college years, including ethical reflection. Faculty find it useful for understanding special problems that students face when confronted with opposing conceptions of fact and value across the curriculum.
For the philosopher, such confrontations occur frequently within each course. But it also indicates major shifts in student epistemic perspectives ranging from initial absolutism through a kind of relativistic functionalism.
Because the account is as clinical as it is empirical in a research sense, it offers a insightful speculations on the emotions, motivations, and anxieties students experience in doing commonsense philosophy and ethics on their educational experience.
Nel Noddings poses mature caring as a model for reorganizing public schools. Students can be taught to care across the board—from the growing of plants in the classroom, through a kind of dialogue and coming to consensus with mathematical concepts, to the nurturing of friendships in class.
But more, students can learn these lessons by being truly cared for by school personnel, not just respected or graded fairly. As a hospital aims to be a care-taking institution, so a school can conceive its overall mission that way, not simply transmitting education or developing student skills and the like, but supporting, nurturing, and partnering with students in every aspect of school life.
That many school personnel mistakenly believe they are already doing this indicates how crucial it is to conceive care at higher developmental levels, with many differentiations and integrations, shadings and textures of adult caring given prominence.
Conventional and post-conventional caring are quite different matters. Imagine what caring of this overall sort would look like in the usually anonymous setting of a college ethics course.
The Kohlbergian approach to moral development has yielded hosts of cross-cultural studies bringing in the more developed cultural research methods of social anthropologists and creating some controversies regarding the issue of cultural relativism and universality Sweder vol.
Research on moral education, using Kohlberg research and theory, has taken several forms. The Kohlbergian approach also has spun of heretical research programs focused on the apparent development of moral conventions and traditions, independent of post-conventional reasoning development Turiel vol.
Narvaez has carried the moral perception component of this research to the classroom, assessing strategies for making students more sensitive to when morally-charged issues arise in daily life. She also has led attempts to integrate moral-development research with related cognitive science research on problem solving.
Much research attention has been paid to the age-old problem of akrasia or weakness of will, termed the judgment-action gap by cognitive psychologists. They suspect that our self-definitions—whether we view our sense of responsibility and character as central to who we are—most determine whether we practice what we moral preach.
But many other factors seem involved, likely centered in moral emotions and attitudes, and the automaticity phenomena just noted. The important areas of moral motivation and emotion have proven the most difficult to get at empirically.
While not part of developmental research or theory, other specialties in psychology and philosophy frame moral-developmental concerns. Psychoanalysts have performed many interesting clinical studies on moral emotions and their motivational effects, focusing on superego functions guilt, fear, shame, regret and the ego-ideal pride, emulation, aspiration, internalization.
Enright vol. Hoffman, as noted, has researched empathy most extensively. For decades, social psychologists such as Adorno and Sherif have looked at issues of cooperation and competition, authoritarianism and democracy in various types of organizations and groups. They have developed an entire area of research, Pro-Social Development, which takes a basically amoral or non-moral look at all forms of socially conforming and contributing behavior.
A formative, but largely abandoned research movement in this area investigated the conditions under which onlookers will help or fail to help strangers, accepting different costs or levels of risks for doing so Bickman vol. An industrial branch of social psychology looks at fairness issues in the workplace and the effects of greater and lesser employee control there. Damon has conducted myriad studies of fairness judgments in early childhood that point to many factors not taken covered by cognitive competence systems of their development.
Related areas of personality psychology look into the motivations behind forms of moral altruism especially, trying to understand the concept of self-sacrifice and doing good for its own sake Staub vol. A very interesting program of altruism research rises directly from philosophical accounts of egoism, both psychological and ethical Batson vol.
Some of the most inspiring research in moral development charts the development and reflective motivations of everyday moral exemplars and heroes. Lawrence Blum offered important distinctions among types of extraordinarily moral individuals, which were incorporated into interview research and theory by Colby and Damon in Some Do Care.
Lawrence Walker has begun a long-term research program in this area as well, which likely will help tie cognitive-moral development in education to the prominent character-education and moral-literacy movement. Character education focuses intently on the nurturing of admirable traits, attitudes, outlooks and value commitments. Without more extensive psychological research to support its traditionalist emphases on core American values, traditional virtues, and the upholding of codes and creeds, this approach flirts with the discredited approaches of early Anglo-American public school education, rife with moralistic strictures and nationalistic indoctrination.
William Puka Email: Pukab aol. Moral Development This entry analyzes moral development as a perennial philosophical view complemented by modern empirical research programs. What it is Human nature is naturally good. What it is for In human nature theory or axiology moral development notions convey a sense of ourselves as dynamic and progressive beings.
Moral Stages of Reasoning Jean Piaget vol. But they recognized that even the most optimistic projections of such behaviorist and Freudian potential falls far short of capturing sophisticated moral deliberation and problem solving, not to mention interpersonal negotiation and relationship Piaget introduced a third factor, the cognitive schema or system, that mediated the interplay of bio-psychology and socialization.
Philosophical Research Method Drawing from the literature of moral philosophy, Kohlberg hypothesized that justice-as-fairness was the central moral concept, also that conflict resolution and fostering mutual cooperation were its chief aims and marks of adequacy. Philosophical Interpretation of Findings Armed with these observations on developmental stages and processes, Kohlberg derived a range of overarching.
Pedagogical Implications Any developmental approach to education starts with this recognition: teachers are presenting ways to think to students who already have their own very competent ways to think.
Related Research The Kohlbergian approach to moral development has yielded hosts of cross-cultural studies bringing in the more developed cultural research methods of social anthropologists and creating some controversies regarding the issue of cultural relativism and universality Sweder vol.
References and Further Reading The empirical research references above can be found in the seven volume series: Moral Development: A Compendium. Puka ed , Garland Press. Classic research by Piaget and Kohlberg is contained in vols.
Cross-cultural and updated longitudinal research is contained in vol. Kohlberg criticism is highlighted in vol. Care research by Gilligan and colleagues is highlighted in vol.
Research on altruism, bystander intervention, egoism, and pro-social development is focused in vol. Additional References: Blasi, A Lapsley and D. Narvaez Eds. Blum, L. Midwestern studies in philosophy. Boston: Routledge Kegan-Paul. Colby, A. NY: Free Press. The Analects. New York: Penguin Classics. Emler, N. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45 Fowler, J.
Stages of Faith. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Gilligan, C. In a Different Voice. Kohlberg, L. The Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper and Row. Narvaez, D. Noddings, N. The Challenge to Care in the Schools. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Oser, F. Stages if religious judgment. Fowler and A.
Vergote eds. Toward Moral and Religious Maturity. Morristonw, NJ: Silver Burdett. Perry, W. Puka, B. Toward Moral Perfectionism. NY: Garland Press. Rawls, J A Theory of Justice. Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum Press.. Salovey, P. An encyclopedia of philosophy articles written by professional philosophers. They believe morality is about avoiding punishment. So, kids at this stage may say what Heinz did was wrong because he broke the law by stealing.
This stage is present in older children, but like the preconventional stage of morality, it can be used by older people as well. This stage mostly focuses on conformity.
This stage is where people focus in on abstract reasoning and universal principles of ethics. Lawrence Kohlberg agreed with Piaget's theory of moral development in principle but wanted to develop his ideas further.
In each case, he presented a choice to be considered, for example, between the rights of some authority and the needs of some deserving individual who is being unfairly treated. Doctors said a new drug might save her. The drug had been discovered by a local chemist, and the Heinz tried desperately to buy some, but the chemist was charging ten times the money it cost to make the drug, and this was much more than the Heinz could afford.
Heinz could only raise half the money, even after help from family and friends. He explained to the chemist that his wife was dying and asked if he could have the drug cheaper or pay the rest of the money later. The chemist refused, saying that he had discovered the drug and was going to make money from it. What if the person dying was a stranger, would it make any difference? Should the police arrest the chemist for murder if the woman died? By studying the answers from children of different ages to these questions, Kohlberg hoped to discover how moral reasoning changed as people grew older.
The sample comprised 72 Chicago boys aged 10—16 years, 58 of whom were followed up at three-yearly intervals for 20 years Kohlberg, Each boy was given a 2-hour interview based on the ten dilemmas. What Kohlberg was mainly interested in was not whether the boys judged the action right or wrong, but the reasons given for the decision. He found that these reasons tended to change as the children got older.
Kohlberg identified three distinct levels of moral reasoning: preconventional , conventional , and postconventional. Each level has two sub-stages. People can only pass through these levels in the order listed. Each new stage replaces the reasoning typical of the earlier stage. Not everyone achieves all the stages. The 3 levels of moral reasoning include. Preconventional morality is the first stage of moral development, and lasts until approximately age 9.
For example, if an action leads to punishment is must be bad, and if it leads to a reward is must be good. Authority is outside the individual and children often make moral decisions based on the physical consequences of actions. Obedience and Punishment Orientation. If a person is punished, they must have done wrong. Individualism and Exchange.
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