chapter summary:

Moral Judgment

• Piaget delineated two age-related moral stages and a transitional period. In the first stage, morality of constraint, young children tend to believe that rules are unchangeable and tend to weigh consequences more than intentions in evaluating the morality of actions. In the autonomous stage, children realize that rules are social products that can be changed, and they consider motives and intentions when evaluating behavior. Several aspects of Piaget’s theory have not held up well to scrutiny, but his theory provided the foundation for subsequent work on moral reasoning.
• Kohlberg outlined three levels of moral judgment— preconventional, conventional, and postconventional—each originally containing two stages (Stage 6 was eventually dropped from Kohlberg’s scoring procedure). Kohlberg hypothesized that his sequence of stages reflects age-related, discontinuous (qualitative) changes in moral reasoning that are universal. According to Kohlberg, these changes stem from cognitive advances, particularly in perspective taking. Although there is support for the idea that higher levels of moral reasoning are related to cognitive growth, it is not clear that children’s moral reasoning moves through discontinuous stages of development or develops the same way in all cultures and for all kinds of moral issues (e.g., prosocial moral reasoning).
• There are important differences among the moral, social conventional, and personal domains of behavior and judgment. Young children, like older children, differentiate among different domains of social judgment. Which behaviors are considered matters of moral, social conventional, or personal judgment varies somewhat across cultures.

The Early Development of Conscience

• The conscience involves internalized moral standards and feelings of guilt for misbehavior: it restrains the individual from engaging in unacceptable behavior. The conscience develops slowly over time, beginning before age 2. Children are more likely to internalize parental standards if they are securely attached and if their parents do not rely on excessive parental power in their discipline, depending on their temperament.

Prosocial Behavior

• Prosocial behavior is voluntary behavior intended to benefit another, such as helping, sharing, and comforting others. Young children who are prosocial, especially those who spontaneously engage in sharing that is personally costly, tend to be prosocial when older.
• Prosocial behaviors emerge by the second year of life and increase in frequency with age, probably due to age-related increases in children’s abilities to sympathize and take others’ perspectives. Differences among children in these abilities contribute to individual differences in children’s prosocial behavior.
• Heredity, which contributes to differences among children in temperament, likely affects how empathic and prosocial children are.
• A positive parent–child relationship; authoritative parenting; the use of reasoning by parents and teachers; and exposure to prosocial models, values, and activities are associated with the development of sympathy and prosocial behavior. Cultural values and expectations also appear to affect the degree to which children exhibit prosocial behavior and toward whom.
• School-based intervention programs designed to promote cooperation, perspective taking, helping, and prosocial values are associated with increased prosocial tendencies in children.

Antisocial Behavior

• Aggressive behavior emerges by the second year of life and increases in frequency during the toddler years; physical aggression starts to decline in frequency in the preschool years. In elementary school, children tend to exhibit more nonphysical aggression (e.g., relational aggression) than at younger ages, and some children increasingly engage in antisocial behaviors such as stealing.
• From preschool on, boys are more physically aggressive than girls and more likely to engage in delinquent behavior.
• Early individual differences in aggression and conduct problems predict antisocial behavior in later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
• Biological factors that contribute to differences among children in temperament and neurological functioning likely affect how aggressive children become. Social cognition also affects aggression: aggressive children tend to attribute hostile motives to others and to have hostile goals themselves.
• Children’s aggression is promoted by a range of environmental factors, including low parental support; chaotic families; poor monitoring; abusive, coercive, or inconsistent disciplining; and stress or conflict in the home. In addition, involvement with antisocial peers likely contributes to antisocial behavior, although it is also likely that aggressive children seek out antisocial peers. Aggression also varies somewhat across cultures, suggesting that cultural values, norms, and socialization practices may also contribute to individual differences in aggression and antisocial behavior.
• Children who are diagnosed with antisocial behavior such as conduct disorder and oppositional defiant disorder display relatively severe forms of problematic externalizing behaviors.
• In high-risk schools, interventions designed to promote understanding and communication of emotions, positive social behavior, self-control, and social problem solving can reduce the likelihood that children will develop behavior problems, including aggression.