Ethical Development, Effects on

Traditional Understandings

The early social-scientific theories on moral development come from Jean Piaget (1965) and later Lawrence Kohlberg (1984). Their cognitive-developmental approaches have continued to be influential in 21st-century literature on media violence. According to their cognitive-developmental models, morality is considered to be a set of rules to be learned and applied. As such, their theories proposed that moral judgment becomes more “advanced” as children’s abstract reasoning abilities increase. Both Piaget and Kohlberg conceived of morality as justice and emphasized that moral advancement consists of an increasing reliance on justice in social judgments.

Piaget’s framework consisted of two primary stages of moral growth. In the first stage, labeled the heteronomous stage, children’s moral judgments are characterized by a dependence on authority, such as parents and teachers, as well as a focus on egoistic perceptions rather than perspective taking. In this stage, punishment handed down by an authority figure appears to be morally just. Observations have shown that when young children see harsh, violent punishment handed down or meted out by an authority figure, they interpret the severity of the punishment as an indicator of the misdeed’s severity. Children in this stage use logic suggesting that the sterner a punishment is, the more justice has been served. Moreover, because young children do not consider others’ intentions, the consequences of a misdeed (rather than motives) are more central in determining whether a behavior is perceived as morally just. Eventually, after children realize that their goals cannot be met by simple judgments based on authoritarian concerns or a focus on egoistic perceptions, they reach the autonomous stage of moral reasoning. In this stage, children can better weigh the proportionality of a misdeed to its respective punishment. According to Piaget, moral judgments in this stage are based on an inner sense of equity. Cognitive reasoning is used to generate such equity-based moral judgments. Also, children advance from stage to stage through a type of mental conflict labeled cognitive disequilibrium, in which children actively construct meaning while engaged in cognitive reasoning.

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