Moral Development

Moral Conduct

The argument for focusing on overt conduct lies both in its practical importance (as the “payoff” of studying morality) and on classic studies by Hugh Hartshorne and Mark May in the 1920s purporting to show that honesty is very situation-specific rather than a characteristic of persons. They reported that cheating by children in one situation did not predict cheating in another situation. However, a later reanalysis of their data showed that there was a common honesty factor, indicating a moral core, in addition to the situation-specific components. Also, years later, Kohlberg argued that knowing whether a person acted apparently in keeping with moral norms did not indicate why he or she acted so. By “why?” Kohlberg was not referring to some ultimate cause, but rather to the reasoning behind and meaning of the act for the actor. Furthermore, many developmental psychologists view the reliance on modeling, contingency, and reinforcement, as posited by social learning theory, inadequate to account for the developmental changes that regularly take place in children's moral thinking, feelings, and conduct.

Parenting and Guilt

Freud and other psychodynamics have focused on moral affect or emotions, especially guilt and shame. Freud's original theory depicted the essential core of morality, termed the superego, as resulting from defensive identification with parents as a way of resolving Oedipal conflicts. In this view, guilt is the child's [Page 682]rivalry with and anger toward parents that is redirected against the self, and it also provides a way of substituting an identification with a loss of affective connection. Originally, the theory was heavily biological in its assumed causes, but as it came to dominate the American intellectual scene, it was transformed into an environmental theory, emphasizing how parenting influences superego strength as reflected in guilt. For example, an early study by Lois Hoffman and Herbert Saltzstein demonstrated a relationship between harsh, coercive parenting or power assertion and both weak guilt and a susceptibility to external influences, and an association between empathy-inducing discipline, called induction, with high guilt and a more fully internal moral sense. These were interpreted as showing that parenting influences moral development.

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