The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  After nine more such interchanges, Bernie gives up and toddles away.82

  Play: The developmentalists L. Alan Sroufe and Robert G. Cooper saw play as the “laboratory” where the child learns new skills and practices old ones.83 Infants cannot play together; that requires emotional and cognitive skills that take two to three years to develop. Two toddlers, put close together, usually just stare at each other, watch each other play, or play side by side. But by three or thereabouts they begin to play together (not necessarily at the same game), and by five they play cooperatively.84

  In play, toddlers and preschoolers learn the first lessons in self-control. They discover that aggression is not tolerated by adult onlookers, and may cause the other child to retaliate or refuse to be a playmate. They learn sharing, albeit with some difficulty. They develop preferences for certain other playmates which, by four, turn into friendships marked by mutuality and commitment.85

  By three or four they begin learning rules of play and the rudiments of right and wrong in play with older children: “Three strikes and you’re out”—and a tantrum won’t get you any more, but may well get you expelled from the game.86

  At about the same time they become more skillful at lying and concealing any facial expression or tone of voice that would give them away. This, one research team claims, is often a direct result of training by parents (“Remember to thank Grandmother for the sweater even though you wanted a toy”).87

  Role playing: Sroufe and Cooper have also called play the “social workshop” in which children try out roles alone and with other children. They often play Mommy-and-Daddy, Mommy-and-baby, Daddy-and-baby, doctor-and-patient, and victim-and-rescuer games. They particularly like playing the parent and ordering their own parent, in the child role, to eat up everything, or get washed, or go to bed. Whether one interprets role playing psychoanalytically, behavioristically, cognitively, or otherwise, it serves as training for social life. One study even found that the more social fantasy play a preschooler engages in, the greater the child’s “social competence,” as rated by teachers.88

  Social competence: The elements of social competence are readiness to engage with peers, ability to sustain give-and-take with them, and popularity with or acceptance by them. Developmentalists measure popularity by such methods as asking the children in a particular play group which of their playmates they “especially like” and which they “don’t especially like”; simply by subtracting the negative responses from the positive ones and adding up the scores, they get an index of each child’s popularity in the group.

  Self and group: In play groups, and even more in classrooms, close contact with other children spurs the development of the sense of psychological self (as distinguished from the physical sense of self of the toddler at the mirror). By eight, children begin to recognize that inwardly as well as outwardly they are different from others and that they are, in fact, unique.89

  At the same time they become keenly aware and observant of group norms—for instance, the rules of games (choosing sides, taking turns, tossing a coin for first side at bat), and group loyalty (“telling on” a peer to parents or teachers is grounds for ostracism). Even at the elementary school level it is important to children to wear whatever is the fad in their group. As they near adolescence, the need to conform to peer-group norms—tastes in clothing, forms of speech, smoking, music, slang, drug use, sexual behavior—becomes extremely powerful. Adolescent peer-group norms and values differ among ethnic groups and social and economic levels, but the need to conform is omnipresent. After early adolescence, it wanes throughout the teen years.90

  Sex-typed behavior: Fifty years ago, it was well established that throughout childhood, and particularly with the approach of adolescence, children increasingly exhibit behavior considered appropriate to their sex. In the 1960s, with the emergence of the women’s liberation movement, many people believed that most sex-typed behavior would prove to be socially prescribed rather than inherent, and would shortly disappear. Much of it has; but some remains and apparently is likely to continue.

  That may be due in part to biology. In the 1970s radioimmunoassay studies showed that hormone levels begin to rise at around seven—long before secondary sex characteristics appear and sex-typed behavior becomes exaggerated.91 It is probably no coincidence that from seven on, few girls play games as rough as those of boys or get as dirty, and that until adolescence few boys are as conscious of their clothing and hair as most girls.

  Yet despite all the changes that the women’s movement sought to initiate four decades ago, the preadolescent accentuation of sex-typed behavior continued to reflect social learning of one’s probable position as an adult in society. Even in 1990, most girls still saw their future in less optimistic terms than boys; that year, a nationwide poll of three thousand boys and girls in grades four to ten found that although in the elementary school years the self-esteem of girls was only slightly lower than that of boys, by middle school it declined markedly and continued at that level in high school. However, a decade later a meta-analysis of later self-esteem studies totaling forty-eight thousand young Americans showed only a minor advantage in self-esteem for males at all ages, a result its four female researchers said surprised them. They offered a number of explanations, but it may well be that the women’s movement had slowly had an effect in our society.92

  Empathy and altruism: In the 1960s, a number of psychologists became interested in “prosocial behavior”—all those cooperative forms of behavior which make social life possible. Many were social psychologists, but others were developmentalists who were intrigued by one form of prosocial behavior, altruism. Much prosocial behavior is selfishly motivated—we stop at red lights and pay our taxes not out of love of our fellow creatures but out of self-interest—but altruism is motivated by concern for the other person. The question the developmentalists found interesting was how such behavior arises, since it is often in conflict with the strongest of all motivations, self-interest.

  In the past four decades hundreds of developmentalists have conducted many hundreds of studies of altruism, using the empirical methods mentioned earlier. The answer to the question “How does altruism develop?” seems to be that it results from a complex interplay of influences: the brain circuitry that tends to cause humans to feel distress at the sight of another human in distress, the model set for children by parental care, cultural values, the growth of the child’s ability to imagine another person’s feelings, social experience (helping someone else enables the helper to see himself or herself as a good sort of person and to be seen as such a person by others), and judgment based on real-world knowledge of the probable consequences for the person in distress of being helped or not being helped.93

  A few salient findings:

  —At ten months or a year, a child, seeing his mother in pain, will, as noted above, whimper or try to crawl away, but by fourteen months is more likely to pat, hug, or kiss her.

  —Beyond eighteen months, a child will make efforts to comfort another child who is crying or will seek adult help.

  —At two to four, a child will ask worried questions of another who is hurt or in pain, try to give reassurance or get help, and will seek to protect other children from harm (by warning them, for instance, of some danger).

  —By seven, most children will go to the aid of a strange child who appears injured or in some difficulty.

  —From seven on, children become more and more willing to give money or toys to unknown poor children or to help others in trouble even when it means giving up something they want to do.

  Developmentalists see a pattern in the data. Altruistic behavior seems to form in a series of fairly distinct stages, but there is no general agreement on how many there are or what they are. In one view there are four, in another five, and a six-stage model has been proposed by the longtime altruism expert Dennis L. Krebs and a colleague, Frank Van Hesteren, of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. 94 Krebs and Van Hesteren’s six st
ages are based on (1) obedience to the rules of authorities and the need for personal security and safety, (2) the maximizing of personal gain and quid pro quo decisions, (3) conformity to role and group expectations, and reciprocity and cooperation, (4) a sense of social responsibility, and behaving in accord with internalized values, (5) upholding the rights of other individuals and a willingness to make a sacrifice to benefit another, and (6) the upholding of universal moral values and identification with all humanity.

  Moral development: Altruism is only one outcome of the development of the moral sense. Interest in that aspect of psychological development began in 1908, when the distinguished English psychologist William McDougall sketched a theory of the development of the moral sense based on his general knowledge of human psychology. In the 1920s Piaget began empirical investigation of the subject by observing children playing games and by telling them stories of little transgressions and asking their views of the proper punishment. (An example: In the first case, a boy fills his father’s inkwell to be helpful but makes an inkblot on the tablecloth. In the second, a boy plays with his father’s inkwell and makes an inkblot on the tablecloth. Should the punishment be the same in each case?)

  Piaget concluded that moral behavior, within the context of game playing, develops between the ages of four and twelve, in three stages, changing from unquestioning acceptance of the rules handed down by parents or older children to a recognition that rules are made by people and can be changed by mutual agreement. Similarly, the basis on which an act (such as the spilling of ink) is judged right or wrong changes from the damage done to the individual’s intentions.95

  Piaget’s Moral Judgment of the Child, appearing in English in 1932, inspired a rash of studies of moral development in America, but most were little more than tinkering and nitpicking. The next major advance, a landmark in the study of moral development, came three decades later and was the work of Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard. He conceived a new method of measuring moral development and over a twenty-five-year span revised it, collected and analyzed data, and propounded a six-stage theory of moral development that became the classic in the field and the model that all others, ever since, have either emulated, modified, or reacted against.

  Kohlberg would have made a good clergyman had he not found his calling as a moral-development psychologist. Earnest and thoughtful, warm and gently humorous, talkative and impassioned, he was profoundly concerned about ethical questions and the moral life. Indifferent to externals, he was the very archetype of the intellectual professor, his clothes baggy and rumpled, his hair disheveled, his briefcase badly scuffed and overfull, his glasses shoved up on his forehead and forgotten there.

  The son of a well-to-do businessman, Kohlberg was born in 1927 in Bronxville, an affluent suburb of New York.96 He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover and graduated as World War II ended. Then, instead of proceeding to college, he was driven by his conscience to become a merchant mariner so as to join a project that was smuggling shiploads of refugee European Jews through a British blockade into Palestine. The experience gave Kohlberg a lifelong interest in the question of when one is morally justified in disobeying the law and legitimate authority. It also gave him a lifelong disease: he was captured and briefly interned in a camp in Cyprus from which he soon escaped, but not before acquiring a parasitic intestinal infection that intermittently ravaged him throughout his life.

  Kohlberg took his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago; psychology and philosophy (particularly ethics) were his twin passions. He read and admired Piaget’s Moral Judgment of the Child, but in the spirit of American psychology felt that a sound theory of moral development should be based on data gathered by objective methods rather than Piaget’s naturalistic observations. For his doctoral dissertation, therefore, he created a rating system (he later made it into a test) that he modified and used for the rest of his life and from which he derived his cognitive-developmental theory of the stages of moral development. The test consists of nine moral dilemmas, which the researcher presents, one at a time, to a subject. Each is followed by an interview comprising a long series of questions about what the subject considers the right and wrong thing to do in the case.

  An example (the “Heinz dilemma”): In a European town, a woman is near death from a special kind of cancer; a new drug, discovered by a druggist in the town, might save her, but he is a profiteer and charges ten times what it costs him to make the medicine. Heinz, the woman’s husband, can borrow only half the amount and pleads with the druggist to cut his price, but the druggist refuses. Heinz thinks about breaking in and stealing the drug to save his wife’s life. Should he? Why or why not? Does he have a duty or obligation to steal the drug? Should he steal the drug for his wife if he doesn’t love her? What if the person dying were a stranger—should Heinz steal the drug for him? It is against the law to steal; does that make it morally wrong? And so on, for a total of twenty-one questions.97

  Kohlberg’s original sample consisted of a cross-section of seventy-two Chicago-area males aged ten, thirteen, and sixteen, whom he tested every two to five years for the next three decades. After the initial testing, the differences in the answers given by the three age groups suggested to Kohlberg that the moral sense develops in distinct stages. Later, when his subjects were all older, he found them advancing through those stages much as he had expected them to. Here, in abbreviated form, and with a simplification of some of Kohlberg’s difficult wording, are the stages of the theory and typical responses at each stage both in favor of and against Heinz’s stealing the drug:

  —Stage 1: Naïve moral realism; action is based on rules, motivation is the avoidance of punishment.

  PRO: If you let your wife die, you will get in trouble.

  CON: You shouldn’t steal the drug because you’ll be caught and sent to jail.

  —Stage 2: Pragmatic morality; action is based on desire to maximize reward or benefit, minimize negative consequences to oneself.

  PRO: If you do get caught, you could give the drug back and you wouldn’t get much of a sentence. It wouldn’t bother you much to serve a short jail term if you have your wife when you get out.

  CON: If you steal the drug, your wife will probably die before you get out of jail, so it won’t do you much good.

  —Stage 3: Socially shared perspectives; action is based on anticipated approval or disapproval of others and actual or imagined guilt feelings.

  PRO: No one will think you’re bad if you steal the drug, but if you let your wife die, you’ll never be able to look anybody in the face again.

  CON: Everyone will think you’re a criminal. After you steal it, you won’t be able to face anyone again.

  —Stage 4: Social system morality; action is based on anticipation of formal dishonor (not just disapproval) and guilt over harm done to others.

  PRO: If you have any sense of honor, you won’t let your wife die. You’ll always feel guilty that you caused her death if you don’t do your duty to her.

  CON: You’re desperate and you may not know you’re doing wrong when you steal the drug. But you’ll know it when you’re sent to jail. You’ll always feel guilt for your dishonesty and lawbreaking.

  —Stage 5: Human rights and social welfare morality; the perspective is that of a rational moral person considering the values and rights that ought to exist in a moral society; action is based on maintaining the respect of the community and one’s self-respect.

  PRO: You’d lose other people’s respect if you don’t steal it. If you let your wife die, it would be out of fear, not reasoning it out. You’d lose self-respect, and probably the respect of others.

  CON: You’d lose standing and respect in the community and violate the law. You’d lose respect for yourself if you’re carried away by emotion and forget the long-range point of view.

  —Stage 6: Universal ethical principles; the perspective is the moral view all human beings should take toward one another and oneself; action is deter
mined by equity, fairness, and concern about maintaining one’s own moral principles.

  PRO: If you don’t steal the drug and let your wife die, you’d always condemn yourself for it afterward. You wouldn’t be blamed and you would have lived up to the law but not to your own standards of conscience.

  CON: If you stole the drug, you wouldn’t be blamed by other people but you’d condemn yourself because you wouldn’t have lived up to your own conscience and standards of honesty.98

  Kohlberg had many devoted followers and admirers, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, when his emphasis on justice and his elevation of Stage 6 decision making over the law made him a favorite with civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and women’s liberationists. But his test and theory have been attacked by many developmentalists on a number of grounds. Some say there is evidence that development is not always upward and sequential (some individuals skip stages in their development, others regress). Some say that moral thinking doesn’t necessarily lead to moral behavior and that individuals often rank higher on the Kohlberg scale than their behavior warrants.99 (Kohlberg insisted that most studies show a correlation between the stage of moral judgment and the actual behavior.) Carol Gilligan, an associate of Kohlberg’s at Harvard, charged that his scale is biased in favor of men: women are likely to respond to moral dilemmas through caring and personal relationships, men by calling on abstract concepts like justice and equity; women therefore score lower on the Kohlberg scale, as if they were less morally developed than men.100

  Kohlberg stoically endured these and other criticisms and assaults, some of which he agreed with (and changed his scoring accordingly), and some of which he quietly rebutted with new data and arguments. He also suffered the failure of two dreams he had devoted much time and energy to. One was a pilot project to raise the moral thinking of prisoners to Stage 4 through discussions of moral dilemmas, the other an attempt to do much the same thing with troubled teenagers. (The results were encouraging, but the project failed to spread beyond a few schools in Cambridge and New York.)