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Morality

Navigating the rules and values of society and learning to cooperate with others are fundamental tasks of social development. As such, how individuals develop a sense of right and wrong has been of long-standing concern to psychologists. Although socialization refers to the broader process by which children acquire the rules and laws of society, morality pertains to a more limited set of norms and expectations regarding how individuals ought to treat others, including concerns for others’ welfare, rights, and fairness. This entry describes the major concepts, themes, and findings regarding moral development from infancy to adulthood, with an emphasis on how specific topics and methods vary across developmental periods.

Classic Theories of Moral Development

For much of the 20th century, two theoretical approaches dominated the study of morality. Socialization perspectives drew on the ideas of Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner to define moral development as the process by which children learn the rules and norms of society. Freud believed that young children adopted the values of their parents through the creation of the superego, which produced feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety when internalized standards were broken. Skinner, however, downplayed the importance of internal psychological processes such as the superego. He believed that children learned to follow rules through behavioral reinforcement, whereby good actions were rewarded and bad actions punished. Integrating these ideas, more recent socialization researchers focus on understanding how parenting practices (e.g., discipline) and negative emotions (e.g., guilt) lead children to internalize societal expectations.

In contrast, cognitive developmental approaches, as exemplified by the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, focused on the development of children’s reasoning about right and wrong, rather than emotions or learned behavior. Much of this work studied the development of qualitatively different stages of moral reasoning. This approach also differs from socialization perspectives in proposing that at the most mature levels, individuals make judgments based on moral principles of justice and rights that are independent of—and distinguished from—a morality based on adherence to family or societal rules, laws, and social conventions.

In the 1970s, researchers also began to study more positive aspects of morality, including children’s prosocial (helping) behavior and emotions such as empathy and sympathy. Although many of the ideas and methods of these early approaches remain influential, contemporary researchers now stress the interconnected nature of thinking (reasoning), feeling (emotions), and acting (behavior). Modern approaches also acknowledge both negative and positive aspects of morality and take into account universal processes and individual differences.

Infancy and Toddlerhood

Although classic approaches assumed that young children were mostly self-centered and lacked a moral sense, researchers now view the first few years of life as important for moral development. Advances in research methods have led to findings that infants and toddlers possess strong tendencies toward attending to others in need. Even day-old newborns respond to the distress of other babies, and in experimental studies, infants as young as 5 months prefer (i.e., look longer at and reach for) prosocial characters to those who behave antisocially.

Complex prosocial behaviors and empathic emotions begin to emerge during the second year of life, as children begin to walk and better understand others’ goals. Studies have found that 14-month-olds readily attempt to help adults in need, and 24-month-olds cooperate with peers to accomplish tasks. Using experiments in which an actor (e.g., the researcher) fakes an injury, studies have also found increases between 14 and 24 months of age in how often children will attempt to alleviate the hurt in others’ distress. This change is directly related to children’s growing ability to recognize others as different from themselves.

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