Moral judgments and aggression in young children: a social domain approach to conceptualizing individual differences in early moral understanding

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, 2016.Social-cognitive developmental research is predicated on the assumption that children’s understanding of the world is inextricably tied to their experiences, actions, and developmental outcomes (Olson & Dweck, 2008). To successfully navigate social life, children must come to appreciate the rules, norms, and expectations that structure their daily interactions. As such, the ability to know right from wrong is critically important for maintaining a just and functioning society and has been studied extensively by social domain theorists (Nucci, 2001; Smetana, 2006, 2013; Smetana, Jambon, & Ball, 2014; Turiel, 1983). Social domain research has shown that children develop a qualitatively different way of thinking about morality compared to other types of social rules and norms. However, this approach has thus far devoted relatively little attention to the question of individual differences in children’s early developing moral understanding, or how these differences may relate to behavior. In contrast, research on the development of aggression has extensively documented the social-cognitive processes and factors that contribute to individual differences in behavior that harms others (Dodge, Coie, & Lynam, 2006). Nevertheless, relatively little research has examined links between moral judgments and aggression prior to adolescence, and existing studies have often used methods incompatible with contemporary theories of moral development and aggression. The goal of the present study was to examine associations between young children’s moral understanding and their aggressive behavior within the framework of social domain theory. The first aim of the proposed study was to examine whether individual differences in 4- to 6-year olds’ ability to differentiate morality from social convention was associated with teacher reports of children’s proactive and reactive aggression. The second goal of the study was to examine the utility of the current approach to conceptualizing moral judgments and domain differentiation for understanding behavior by comparing it to the two assessments most commonly used in past research with young children: initial moral “wrongness” ratings and criterion judgments of moral (but not conventional) transgressions. The sample consisted of 101 four- to 6-year olds (53% female; Mage = 5.12 years, SD= .67) and their daycare/school teachers (n = 18). Children were administered a revised version of the Social Rules Interview (Smetana, 1981; Smetana & Braeges, 1990; Smetana, Rote et al., 2012) in their classrooms, with aspects altered to lessen the cognitive and linguistic burdens of the original interview. In order to examine the importance of carefully attending to the constructs under investigation, teachers rated children along behavioral constructs that were more (proactive aggression) and less consistent (reactive aggression, prosocial behavior) with the theoretical definitions of morality. Latent difference score models (McArdle, 2009) were used to capture children’s ability to differentiate morality and social convention and test associations between this ability and behavior. Replicating past social domain research, children made a significant overall distinction between moral and conventional concepts. In line with our hypotheses, however, significant variation in the ability to distinguish the domains was also observed; this variability in scores was not associated with age, gender, or race. Further consistent with hypotheses, we found that children who were less able to differentiate morality from convention were rated as higher in proactive aggression (after controlling for reactive aggression). Unexpectedly, greater domain distinction ability was associated with higher levels of reactive aggression (after controlling for proactive aggression). As expected, no links between domain distinctions and prosocial behavior were observed. Finally, the conceptualization of moral understanding as the ability to differentiate moral and conventional concepts proved to be a better and more theoretically consistent predictor of proactive aggression compared to the two most commonly used judgment assessments used in prior research. These findings help to explain why previous research has typically failed to find meaningful associations between moral judgments and aggression. In contrast to the prevailing assumption that aggressive and non-aggressive children do not differ in their understanding of morality, children who engaged in more coercive, manipulative forms of aggression showed clear deficits in their ability to differentiate morality from other types of social rules. Future studies need to carefully consider the theoretical definitions underlying assessments of moral cognitions and behavior