One of the most persistently asked and perpetually unanswered questions in psychology is the question of morality. What is it, how does it develop, and where does it come from? A basic definition of morality is “beliefs about what is right behavior and what is wrong behavior” (Merriam-Webster). Based on the definition, the question then becomes even more complicated; How do people decide what is right and what is wrong? Research has examined this from many different angles, and two distinct schools of thought have emerged. One centers on the Lockian idea of children as blank slates who must be taught the difference between right and wrong and what it means to be moral, while the other espouses a more Chomskian perspective of a preset system of basic rules and guidelines that needs only to be activated. So what does this mean for humans and humanity? Are we born tabula rasa or are we born with an innate sense of good and evil? For those researching this topic, the question then becomes how to most effectively theorize, experiment and interpret human morality. Reciprocity and empathy Children as Blank Slates: Locke, Piaget and Kohlberg For philosopher John Locke, humans could only be defined through their sense of self, and this sense of self was not automatic, but rather gradual. He believed that humans were, at birth, tabula rasa and it was the accumulation of sense perception and experience that allowed human beings to develop their sense of what it mean to be human and learn to function in a social system. He also argued that the way in which people clustered their experiences became the foundation for the rest of their lives and it was a key part of parenting and education to ensure that the foundations were sound (Copelston,... ... middle of paper ... ...13). Do infants detect indirect reciprocity? Cognition, 129(1) 102-113. Morality. 2014. In Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved April 4, 2014 from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morality Premack, D. (2007). Foundation of morality in the infant. Social brain matters: Stances on the neurobiology of social cognition, 190, 161-167. Scarf, D., Imuta, K., Colombo, M., Hayne, H. (2012) Social evaluation or simple association? Simple association may explain moral reasoning in infants. PLoS ONE 7(8) doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042698 Schmidt M.F.H., Sommerville, J.A. (2011). Fairness Expectations and Altruistic Sharing in 15-Month-Old Human Infants. PLoS ONE 6(10): e23223. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0023223 Wade, N. (2007, September 18). Is ‘do unto others’ written into our genes? New York Times Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html?sq&_r=0
Rest, J., Narvaez, D., Thoma, S., & Bebeau, M. (1999). DIT2: Devising and testing a revised instrument of moral judgment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91(4), 644-659.
Graham, Jesse and Johnathan Haidt. 2011. The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of
(Jensen, 2005, p. 69) could be compared with the importance of desired moral reasoning. The
Malatesta, C. Z., & Haviland, J. M. (1982). Learning display rules: The socialization of emotion expression in infancy. Child development, 991-1003.
Today I will be interviewing Baumeister, Gilligan, and Piaget who are some of the most influential psychologists in the field of moral development. I will be interviewing these three so and I have three critical questions in the field of moral development that I would like each to answer. I will then conclude with a brief summary of the similarities and differences between the psychologists I have interviewed.
Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism; it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood (“Jonathan Haidt Quotes.”). This quote sums the importance of morality perfectly. Even though morality may not be beneficial when the lives of the many out way the lives of the few or if it endangers your own well-being, we have an obligation to understand the morality of different people whether it’s socially, culturally, or religiously. When we fail to take into account these difference we breed conflict and eventually war.
Proper socialization as an infant has long lasting effects on an individual well into adulthood. Sociality in the form of bonding with one’s mother, friendships or just mental stimulation from sound and touch can help form a person’s personality and determine their moral attitude. Morality correlates to empathy because empathy gives someone the ability to relate to how another is feeling, which in turn could help someone determine what is considered right and wrong. Empathy is associated with being responsible for someone’s ability to make socially acceptable decisions and exhibit moral behavior. When someone is lacking empathy or has been socially stunted such as the case of the Romanian orphans, it is believed that they are more capable of doing immoral things such as stealing, lying and cheating. What is morally acceptable
taught, but these studies prove that genetics are responsible, as altruism is innate. One finding in
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionis approach to moral
A human being, such as all organisms, learns to do things such as walking and talking at a very young age. After this time of physical development, the child will be ready to develop even more by strengthening other aspects such as the brain. Being able to think for oneself is essential for any human in order to become an active member of society. Once basic thinking is developed, it will be time to start learning how to develop the morals of a person. This kind of development is done in stages and “people cannot progress to higher stages of moral development until they have also progressed through higher stages of understanding how to think, reason, remember, and solve problems” (Frick-Horbury 1). The most effective way to achieve development is by role-playing and showing the child in undeveloped ways they would understand. “The person’s understanding of the situation must be actively charged by using situations within a person’s own experience and chaining them to the event at hand” (Frick-Horbury 4). For example, a child will not care if they take another child’s toy away, but once that toy is taken away from the first child, they will feel what the other child felt and have a better understanding of why snatching the toy was wrong. As the child grows, they will experience more of these kinds of situations, strengthening their moral
Parental injunctions are also the source of moral imperatives. However, when a parent instructs a child to follow a moral injunction, he is, in fact, doing two things. First, he presents a specific ethical content to be followed. Second, he trains the child to comply with authoritative injunctions per se”. Milgram suggests that when a parent instructs or commands their child about something, they are implying an implicit and explicit imperative. For example, when a parent tells their child not to play too rough with their younger sibling, the child automatically receives two messages. The first is how to treat their younger sibling, and the second implicit imperative, is to obey the command itself. This is only the beginning of many more methods of conditioning a child will experience in their life. For example, when a child emerges out from the nesting of their family, they will enter another system of authority, which is school. At school, a child learns how to function in society, their actions regulated by their teachers. The child will soon grow older and enter the workforce, where their boss must permit everything they say or do. In this way, Milgrim suggests that the very basis of our morals and ideals are innately connected to having an obedient attitude. The groundbreaking results Milgram found from his obedience study can be explained using this view that people are conditioned early on in life to obey authority figures in order to achieve success and acceptance. This can explain why over 50 percent of all participants obeyed the command of delivering severe electrical shocks to someone who they believed was undeserving. It seems that it does not matter whether one is male or female, young
What is morality? What is being moral? Is it just being able to make the decision from right and wrong making the right decisions from good and bad? There are many great philopshers who had their own ideas on morality. Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Aristotle and Virginia Held all had different ideas and or approaches to resolving ethical problems. Though each of them differs from each other they each have their own positive and negative attributes.
At the pre-conventional level, behavior is motivated by anticipation of pleasure or pain. The child is aware of cultural rules and labels of good or bad and right or wrong. (1) The subject interprets the labels in terms of the physical consequence, such as punishment or reward. (3) The child has an extreme self-interest. The first level of moral thinking is generally found at the elementary school level, before the age of 9. This level is divided into the following two stages. (2)
...evidence to support the existence of an innate moral grammar in human language. While moral instinct may seem to be the direct opposite of moral reasoning, they are complementary. When confronted with moral dilemmas, people use different ways to resolve them. A science of moral sense has many benefits in understanding morality and demystifying unclear moral concepts.
In the article “What makes us moral” by Jeffrey Kluger, he describes how morality is defined and how the people follow rules. Kluger discusses about scientific research that has been done to point out the important reasons of morality. Kluger explains that a person’s decision to do something good or bad is based on empathy, that humans tend not to do bad to those they sympathize with. Kluger also compares humans with animals and thinks that morality is the only thing that separates us from animals. I do agree with Kluger that people are born with a sense of right and wrong, but we should be taught how to use it. We learned to be nicer to those around us because we already know the type of person they are, and the morality we learned as children