Critical Thinking Questions

1. Recall a recent moral dilemma in your own life. What sorts of reasoning did you use when thinking about the dilemma? On what dimensions did it differ from Kohlberg’s Heinz dilemma? How might these differences have affected your reasoning about this dilemma?
2. How would you design a study to determine why aggressive children and adolescents have aggressive friends? How would you determine whether aggressive youth simply choose aggressive friends or whether aggressive friends tend to make youth become more aggressive?
3. Suppose you wanted to assess children’s helping behavior that was altruistic and not due to factors such as the expectation of personal gain or concern about others’ approval. How would you design a study to assess altruistic helping in 5-year-olds? Might the procedure differ if you wanted to assess altruistic helping in 16-year-olds?
4. Freud believed that morality does not emerge until the child develops a superego at around 4 to 6 years of age. What evidence contradicts his theory?
5. Using the tenets of social learning theory (see Chapter 9), outline ways that parents might deter the development of aggression in their children.