Psych 125
Human Development
Christopher Gade
Office: 1031-G
Office hours: Tu 12-1:30 and by apt.
Email: gadecj@gmail.com
Class: T 1:30-4:20 Room 2210
Let’s Play a Game…
• What you’re going to do in this game is choose
between two different cards. The one on the left
and the one on the right.
• Please don’t look ahead at the cards that are on
the slides. If you do, you lose all of the games
automatically.
• If you choose the higher of the two cards 3/5
times, you get 2 extra credit points.
How does this relate to today’s topic?
• How many of you “know” that nobody cheated on
this because nobody got caught?
• How many of you are upset with people that were
here before class and possibly saw me going over
the slides?
• How many of you are upset with those that might
have intentionally looked ahead in the slides?
• How many of you are upset with me for not
stating the rules clearly?
• How many of you are upset with me for anything
else that I might have done during this game?
Morality
• Morality – a sense or standard that determines
the difference between right and wrong
– Moral development – the changes and growth in the
individuals:
– Standards of morality
– Beliefs of the outcomes
for morality
– Recognition of the
complexity of morality
– Moral related behaviors
Piaget’s Concept
• As we grow cognitively, we also
develop morally as well
– 4 to 7: Children perceive the world as
“right or wrong”; They believe that
any wrong behaviors will ultimately
be punished, and that all behaviors are a product of
intentionality
• Heteronomous morality – the belief that rules are inherent
and cannot be changed
• Immanent justice – the belief that punishment will be
delivered for all immoral behavior
• Note: this often leads children to imply that bad things that
happen to a person are a result of immoral behavior
Piaget’s Concept of Growth
• 7+: Children develop a more social perspective on
morality
– Autonomous morality – the belief that rules and laws,
and in most cases, morality, are created by people
– Fallible justice – the belief that punishment for
immoral behavior will only occur if the behavior is
caught
– Intentionality in morality – the belief that behaviors
are immoral only if the person was:
1. aware of the immorality
2. intended to commit the behavior
Testing Morality
• Rate the morality of the behaviors of these
individuals on a scale of 1-10?
• Gary and Kenny stop at a gas station to pick up
some sodas. They pick their own choices and
bring them to the counter in order to pay for
them with Gary’s credit card. The cashier then
tells them that they only accept cash. Since they
don’t have cash, they decide to run out of the
store with the sodas. In their attempt to flea,
Kenny gets caught by a police officer that
happened to be outside. Gary gets away.
Testing Morality
• Rate the morality of the behaviors of these
individuals on a scale of 1-10?
– Becky was concerned about the upcoming final so she
spent hours studying. On the day of the exam, her
professor accidentally posted the answers to the first
ten questions on an overhead. She quickly memorized
the answers so she could use them on the test.
– Erika was concerned about the upcoming final so she
decided to steal a copy of the exam key. She copied
down all of the answers on her arm before the exam.
It was raining outside before the exam and she got her
arm wet. So wet that she couldn’t read her answers
and she was forced to take the exam without the key.
Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987)
• Worked under the tutelage of Jean
Piaget
• Chose to examine development from
a moral perspective
• Argued that similar to cognitive development,
children also go through stages of moral
development throughout their lives
• Contended that children progress through these
stages in a set order, but that people did not
necessarily advance through all of these stages in
their life
The Story Of Heinz
• In Europe, a woman was near death from a
special kind of cancer. There was one drug
that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of
radium that a druggist in the same town had recently
discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the
druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him
to make. He paid 2000 for the radium and charged
$20,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's
husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow
the money, but he could only get together about $
10,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist
that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or
let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered
the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz
got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the
drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that?
Why, or why not?
But what causes the change?
• Both Kohlberg and Piaget
stressed the importance of
social learning
• They argued that children
needed to be exposed to
higher thinking and the flaws
in their current thinking in
order to advance
• They also noted that social
interaction could speed
children through stages of
moral development
Concerns about Moral Development Theories
• Cultural influence
• Differences in focus, not moral
development
– Pre-Conventional - self
– Conventional - others
– Post-Conventional - combination
• Gender differences in moral orientation?
– Carol Gilligan
• The difference between behavior and moral
responses
Other Theories Of Moral Growth
• Social-cognitive/behaviorist perspective:
Individuals don’t grow in moral reasoning, instead
they vary from each other based on what they
learned about morality from their environment
– Range of morality
• Prosocial  antisocial
– Morality conditioning
– Morality learning
• Identity
• Character
• Exemplars
– Situation-specific morality
• Competencies – moral capabilities and recognition of moral
appropriate behaviors in situations
Where’s the Learning Coming From?
• Peers
– Stressed by
Kohlberg and Piaget
• Parents
– Modeling
– Empowering
– Cocooning
– Pre-arming
• Schools
– Standards (cheating)
– Identity (service learning, forming values & concepts)
Other Proposed Sources of Morality
• Religion
• Internal Thoughts
• Personal Experience
– Past encounters
– Exposure to
prosocial/antisocial
behaviors
Moving On…
• In the next class, we’ll be having our third and
last exam of the semester.
• The week after that, you have your final
papers due.
• That’s it for what we’ll be covering in class this
semester. I hope you enjoyed the journey.