PY 352 Final

Prejudice

-A prejudice is a negative attitudes, feelings and behaviors toward a group typically based on a stereotype. Note that stereotypes, which inherently inaccurate, are not necessary negative but prejudices are.

stereotype

-A stereotype is a rigid, simplistic, and erroneous characterization of a particular group or sex. -One of the first stereotypes children acquire relates to biological sex. Children discover their biological sex about 2 years. After this they begin searching for things that make people "boys" versus "girls" Children show stereotypical toy and play choices before they have a form grasp on cultural sex stereotypes. But by 4 years, can reliably list the occupations and activities stereotypically associated boys versus girls, men versus women.

four major categories of psychological mechanisms

-Cognitive restructuring refers to beliefs and arguments that serve to frame harmful conduct in a positive light through such things as "moral justification" (portraying the behavior as serving a worthy cause or some moral purpose), "euphemistic labeling" (using language that makes negative acts sound less negative), and "advantageous comparisons" (making a negative act seem less negative by comparing it to a much more negative act). -Minimizing one's agentive role refers to cognitive strategies that displace or diffuse responsibility for negative acts by minimizing or obscuring one's own personal responsibility in deference to a larger authority and/or group responsibility -Disregarding/ distorting the negative impact of harmful behavior involves strategies that help to distance oneself from the harm or to emphasize positive rather than negative outcomes associated with the behavior -Blaming and dehumanizing the victim involves seeing the victim as somehow deserving of these detrimental acts, or "bringing it on themselves" or being partially responsible for such maltreatment.

Cognitions in hate

-Ideological belief that one's own side is good and the other evil, validation of belief, instrumental to the solution to a problem -Revenge over injustice, unfairness, and humiliation -Greed, lust, ambition Fear - hate is fight response to extreme fear, especially when one feels powerless, e.g. terrorists? -Kernberg (1993) argued a normal response to danger, even adaptive. But people can't hate and not want someone destroyed? Also fear also results in flight, so ...? -Destructive ideologies that specify the relation between different groups and teach people how to behave toward each other

Minimal groups

-In these types of studies, children can be give arbitrary traits--like what color t shirt they wear--and yet they prefer their group and develop negative views of the out group. Even when they know the assignment to groups was arbitrary at the beginning. Color was not inherently unequal but it became so to the children if the environment used t-shirt color to organize children. This has very obvious relation to the history of supposed "separate-but-equal" that was used to justify racial segregation and sex-segregated institutions. - in-group and out-group salience can disconnect prejudice from family and teacher messages encouraging unity. That is, even when teachers preached equality and didn't privilege one t-shirt color over another, negative prejudices developed toward people with opposite color t-shirts id t-shirt color was used in the environment to organize people into groups, such as lines to go to the cafeteria or mentioned at the bottom of students' work.

Eliminating Negative Consequences

-Parents who emphasize racial heritage have children who are more resilient to prejudice and discrimination -Social contact between groups occurs in contexts where participation is on equal footing -Participation takes place where group pursue common goals -Teaching all children about the history and culture of diverse groups.

Punishment by natural and logical consequences

-Parents' reliance on "natural and logical consequences" can be especially effective as part of the parenting arsenal. Natural and logical consequences was advocated by Rudolf Dreiker. In Dreiker's view, there is a distinction between lawful and arbitrary consequences. -An arbitrary consequence is one that cannot be deduced from the act that it is contingent upon. -A lawful consequence is one that follows logically or naturally from the act. -Dreiker's suggested: Parents should allow their children to experience the effects of their good and bad decisions. Don't put parents in the position of rewarding and punishing children. Let children take responsibility--Reaping benefits when judgment is good and the negative consequences when judgment is bad. -When natural consequence is not possible, use a logical one. Natural consequences should be distinguished from punishment, in that the consequences "fit the crime" and are not arbitrary the way punishment usually is. In particular, proponents point out: NC expresses the impersonal reality of the social order and world; punishment expresses power and authority

What is harm?

-Some authors emphasize consequences. Something is aggressive or harmful if that is how the victim experiences it. That is, aggression and harm is "an action that delivers a noxious stimuli to another organism" -Some authors emphasize intentions. On this definition, being harmful is "engaging in behavior that is designed to harm or injure another human being who is motivated to avoid such treatment". This solves some of the above problems. For example, since the definition stresses that intention to affect someone by doing something they don't want, we no longer have a problem with accidental harm and unsuccessful harm. The actor's intent matters.

Postconventional Morality

-Virtuous if adhere to higher and universal principles of justice, fairness, and human/individual rights -Rarely seen before college (Stage 6 is extremely rare even in adults)

Conventional Morality

-Virtuous if do what told by authorities or conform to norms -Seen in a few older elementary school students, some junior high school students, and many high school students (Stage 4 typically does not appear until the high school years)

Preconventional Morality

-Virtuous if not punished much or do not suffer negatively compared to gains -Seen in preschool children, most elementary school students, some junior high school students, and a few high school students

social categories

-include ascribed (Sex race Skin color Body type and height Disabilities Nationality/immigrant status Etc.) and achieved (Status SES Wealth Hobbies Intellect & education Etc.) characteristics. -Children form social categories as based on superficial features at a very early age. In an earlier unit we reviewed infants' preferences for attractive adults, for female faces, for own sex and own race faces. Gender based toy choice begins about 2 years of age, although identification of certain activities as gender stereotypical does not emerge until 4 or 5 years. True group favoritism based on race and gender clearly begins in 2-4 year olds and is fully evident by 5-7 years. -A social category is not a stereotype

Mary Rebecca Story

-retalitory aggression -Studies in the Nature of Character" by Hartshorne & May, 1930- deciet, cannot make assumptions about character based off of certain actions bc it is not a good predictor of how a person will respond to other situations

Accountability

Aggression can be direct or indirect

How stable is aggression over development?

Aggression, conduct disorder, and harmfulness are both stable and unstable. Aggression declines, as a rule, as children get older and changes in form with age. But the comparatively most aggressive individuals tend to be the most aggressive at every age and the those who are comparatively unlikely to use aggression tend to stay the individuals who are unlikely to use aggression later on. Individual children who are highly aggressive early on and stay that way are the more problematic. In fact, there are several types of stable and unstable patterns. Some people start moderate or high and decline as they get older, some are never aggressive, but some stay aggressive from early in life onward. We know these are the most disturbed. There is also a fifth pattern: a group that doesn't get aggressive until adolecence. These are adolescent-onset delinguents. Their aggression normally is a just a reflection of the "stage" or an expression of rebellion, but it is not as serious and worrisome as aggressiveness that continued from early childhood. This group normally "grows out of it."

Genetic Factors.

Aggressive antisocial behavior runs in families. Twin studies suggest heritability could be as high as 50% BUT remember: High heritability doesn't mean the environment isn't important. Heritability predicts better to early aggression than later. And in boys than in girls.

Goal difficulties

Aggressive children faced with social dillemas are: Less relationship focused More face saving Greater emphasis on revenge They also seems to have more problems balancing goals so that they accomplish several things at once. Overall aggressive children expect less trouble from adults, expect more peer approval, expect more success, feel less bad, and expect the victim to have more pain.

Bandura's Moral disengagement:

Bandura describes moral disengagement as the sociocognitive processes through which the average person is able to commit horrible acts against others. Bandura describes four major categories of psychological mechanisms by which 'good people do bad things', including the cognitive restructuring of harmful behavior, obscuring or minimizing one's role in causing harm, disregarding or distorting the impact of harmful behavior, and blaming and dehumanizing the victim.

The Problem of Problem Ownership

Broadly speaking, the use of punishment and which form of punishment to use relates to a larger question: Who owns the problem? The parent owns the problem when the child's behaviors are causing a problem for the parent. The child owns the problem when the child's behaviors are inherently a problem for the child. Many things children are punished for seem perfectly acceptable to them, but are a problem for their parents. The don't have much motivation to change these, except to avoid trouble with the parent or to please the parent. But they are highly motivated to change behaviors that a problem for them

Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan suggested Kohlberg's definition of morality was too narrow. Sometimes moral dilemmas involve questions of what is right, fair, and just. But sometimes these same dilemmas have other dimensions to them and can be handled with other solutions. If someone focuses on some other aspect of the problem, they could appear to be less morally sophisticated but that is only because Kohlberg ordered his categories and levels solely in terms of rights. Gilligan suggested women sometimes adopt a caring rather than a social justice orientation to dilemmas. A caring orientation can lead women to ignore the aspects of the problem that are about what is fair or just and instead emphasize what is compassionate and caring. Gilligan was both right and wrong. She devised dilemmas that had the possibility of being adequately solved by compassion and caring and showed that some people do in fact stress this aspect of of the problem over deciding solely on the basis of what is just and fair. But this wasn't just women. Most research shows that both boys and girls think about dilemmas in terms of BOTH justice and caring. It is the nature of the dilemma, not the sex of the child that dictates that determines what they choose. In fact, Kohlberg's original finding that men scored higher than women was not born out in later research anyway. Also, culture plays a role.

When does aggression first emerge?

Conflicts over objects are very common between 12 and 18 months of age, especially with siblings. After 18 months, physical attacks become more common (e.g. hitting, pushing) Most people have difficulty thinking the pushing and shoving and biting of toddlers in arguments over objects as aggression however. Studies have shown that infants fight over objects even if a second exact same object is available to them. If someone else has it, it is more valuable. In general however toddler disputes are really more about developing sociality than aggression. The toddlers are learning how to cooperate and resolve conflict and what starts fights.

Aggression during elementary school

Continued decline, especially physical and instrumental. But interestingly there is a little peak in retaliatory aggression. What is that and why? Retalitory aggresion is aggression meted out because one feels one has been unfairly harmed or intentially attacked. This may reflect growing skills ironically: These older children have better perspective taking skills and can tell what someone intended. denial doesn't always work anymore. There is a growth in normative beliefs in retaliation. That is, defending oneself and honor start to become values

Debating the origins of morality

Debates over whether and how children behave morally are as old as parenting. One one view, children have no inherent goodness or badness. They are just blank slates and turn out as we share them. This is the mechanistic view of morality that we considered so carefully in the second unit of the course. On the side of those who do suggest that children possess an inherent morality , are those that view children as inherently bad versus those who see children as inherently good. Freud's view of the child as inherently selfish (the Id) is a good example of the former. It is hard sometimes not to feel this way sometimes, as a review of the farcical Toddler's Rules of Object Ownership illustrates. But we also reviewed evidence in the last unit of children spontaneous empathy and helping. Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher in the 1700s, was concerned with how to preserving human freedom in a world where human beings are increasingly dependent on one another for the satisfaction of their needs. Rousseau rebelled against the prevailing wisdom of his days that God created us to be unequal. He felt that view confirmed the rightness of social hierarchy and privilege. He felt that man is naturally good, but society has made him wicked. That is to say, we are not corrupted by original sin as the churches taught, or driven by instinct to dominate each other. If we are selfish and competitive and possessive, it is because we have been conditioned to be.

Studies in the Nature of Character" by Hartshorne & May, 1930

Deceit in one context did not predict deceit in another Almost any child could be deceitful, but no child was deceitful in every context Child disapproved of deceit, even in the contexts on which they were deceitful These findings flew in the face of the idea that there is such a things as "character" as in the idea that some individuals have good character and others do not. From this work, and others, we are forced to conclude that moral thought and behavior, and may other domains of thought and behavior, are very sensitive to context and competing motives. The key issue is that people who are willing to lie, cheat, steal and so on in one setting cannot be assumed to be willing to lie, cheat, or steal etc. in any other. And one cannot make assumptions about what this or that personality might do in their own home or in other moral dilemmas based on things they are willing to do and say on air, and vice versa. Likewise, someone willing to cheat during a online multi-player game will not necessarily cheat on a school test, etc. It is never that simple.

Developmental Intergroup Theory

Developmental intergroup theory suggests that biases may be largely under environmental control and thus might be shaped via educational, social, and legal policies. It has two tenets: Children actively categorize objects of all types, animate and inanimate As a result they are vigilant to features between groups that are salient and they come to over-rely on them. Even superficial and arbitrary things that are associated with one sex or group versus another can lead to in-group favoritism. When they or someone else assigns themselves membership in one of these groups, they will ascribe positive things to all members of their group and not to the other group They will do this unless important adult figures favor one group over the other. If that is the case, they will ascribe positive things to the favored group, even if that is not their group.

Parenting and conscience

Freud regarded conscience as the internalization of parent's values as a consequence of identifying with the same sex parent. It is apparent that such an idea is wrong. Children develop moral emotions and discuss behavior standards well before the time period Freud earmarked. Even 2 year olds show guilt when they do something wrong and can begin to articulate standards of behavior and have the desire to comply. Conscience is facilitated by parent discipline practices that de-emphasize power assertion and emphasize reflection and understanding of values. Where there is open communication and a secure positive parent-child relationship. Children prone to fear show more guilt at a younger age and conscience is promoted by gentle parenting discipline that has an abundance of reasoning and few transparent incentives for compliance (bribes, rewards, threats, etc.). This prevents these children from becoming apprehensive and anxious and tuning out the parent's message. More difficult children not prone to fear show less guilt at a younger age and conscience is promoted by secure attachment and warmth, responsivity and mutual cooperation, and firm and articulated expectations for behavior. Fearless children are more motivated by a desire to please a parent than their fear of the parent.

Hostile attribution bias in ambiguous circumstances

Habitually aggressive children have a tendency to assume people acted with hostility towards them when it is less obvious and ambigous to others that they did so. Much of their subsequent behavior reflects this "rush to judgment"

Is hate irrational?

Haters often show "Just world "thinking (Staub, 1996), which is: -Explaining and interpreting violence and hate toward others as a justified response to the others' actions, intention, values, or character -Devaluing increases and hateful behavior increases. -"Moral Exclusion" the moral standards that their believe still apply to others don't also apply to them with regard to their victims

Instrumental vs hostile aggression

Instrumental aggression serves the aggressors' instrumental purposes. Its not "personal", not targeted, and here is no feelings of hostility or hate. Hostile aggression is targeted, personal, with feelings of hate, anger, and other strong negative emotions.

What is Evil?

It seems that when we cannot capture the moral significance of hateful actions and perpetrators by calling them 'wrong' or 'bad' or even 'very very wrong' or 'very very bad.' We call them evil. Philosophers distinguish at least two types of evil: Natural evils are bad states of affairs which do not result from the intentions or negligence of moral agents. Hurricanes are examples of natural evils. Moral evils do result from the intentions or negligence of moral agents. Murder and lying are examples of moral evils. We expect evil people to remarkable people. But the researchers have often commented on the extraordinary ordinariness of evil people, like serial killers, Nazi's, butchers, mass shooters. Implication is that people just like you would be able to be perpetrators of horrible crimes against others. Indeed, entire peoples and masses. This is referred to as the The "banality of evil" (Arendt).

Kohlberg's stages in moral reasoning

Kohlberg conceptualized the child as a moral philosopher and sought to understand the maximum sophistication of their thinking and how it might be look upon by philosophers. He relied heavily on the device of the moral dilemma. In a moral dilemma, several values and courses of action are pitted against one another in a difficulty way and respondents are asked what they would do and why. The actual decision is not important, as people could make the same choice for very different moral justifications. In his most famous dilemma, for example, a husband is faced with the choice between stealing and saving a life. When Kohlberg gave this and several other dilemmas to individuals between the ages of 6 and adult he noticed many of the same things Piaget did, but also some new things children seemed to go through. Like Piaget, Kohlberg noticed that much of childhood was characterized by an emphasis on convention. But there was also a pre-conventional period and, for some individuals, a post-conventional period.

Conscience

Moral reasoning is often part of what people think of as having a conscience. Conscience is an internal regulatory mechanism that increases the individual's ability to conform with standards of conduct and ethical behavior. Healthy conscience governs moral behavior even when no one is monitoring. And it promotes prosocial behavior and inhibits antisocial behavior. It has two components Moral emotions such as guilt that lead to resistance to deviation and a willingness to be held accountable for transgressions or make amends Understanding of standards of behavior

Children's Social, Ethical, and Moral judgments

Moral reasoning is reasoning about the appropriate thing to do in issues of right and wrong, fairness, and justice. Social conventional reasoning is reasoning about behaving appropriately around customs or regulations designed to ensure smooth social coordination and social organization. Personal judgments are judgments of prudence, priorities, and personal preference. Children consider people who break Moral rules to be bad people. But people who break social conventions are simply "crazy". These distinctions influence the importance we afford issues, whether we comply, and whether we expect or accept punishment for transgressions. For example, by age 3, children believe moral violations are worse than social conventional violations and by age 4, they believe that moral violations, but not social conventional ones, are wrong even if no one knows about them and even if adults say they are okay.

Consistency in Moral Behavior

Most common sense, religious, and philosophical conceptions of morality and its development do not deal adequately with a very common research observation: individual people are not consistent in their moral reasoning and behavior. This is a problem for any conceptualization that sees morality as something some people have and other do not or that frames morality in sweeping terms.

Aggression during adolescence

Most forms of aggression almost disappear in adolescence for most children. This period is sometimes thought of as a period of great antisocial and aggressiveness. Why? This perception persists because there is a minority of youth who increasingly engage in highly visible, dangerous and salient forms of aggression or antisocial behavior.

Natural consequences vs. punishment

NC relates to the future; punishment the past. NC less moral judgment; punishment tells the child she is bad. Otherwise there is some commonality, except, of course, the parent is not at the center of the negative effects--the child is.

Piaget's early observations

One of the first developmental researchers to probe children's reasoning in this way was Piaget. In 1932, Piaget posed scenarios to young kids and he also quizzed children about the rules of games, particularly marbles. He observed that they don't reason as you might expect. For young children—less than 10 years old: Judgments of culpability were based on the act's consequences much more than the actors' intentions Punishments bear little relation or proportionality to the degree of transgression Piaget characterized the moral reasoning of children at this age as "Moral Realism." Not to be confused with realistic. Children in this stage understand the concept of rules, but they are seen as external and immutable. Children obey rules largely because they are there. Because a rule tells you what you're not supposed to do, moral realist children evaluate wrongdoing in terms of its consequences, not the intentions of the wrongdoer. Curiously, he also found that child displayed a faith in something he called "Immanent Justice." A kind of magical thinking in which accidents and natural disasters represent divine justice and retribution. Misdeeds never go unpunished

Is Moral Reasoning Rational?

One problem with the moral reasoning approach to moral development is that people often have very strong feelings of what is right and what is wrong but can say why or why not no matter how much time you give them. Most people feel it is okay to sacrifice one person to save the lives of a dozen others but only if you don't have to actively kill that sacrificed person oneself. If you have to actively kill some innocent person to save others, most people will say it is not okay. But they cannot tell you why. This is the the same kind of implicit morality that leads people to judge things like eating your dog as wrong, even though we eat other animals. This is called mral dumbfounding.

Neurological Factors

Persistently aggressive children have tempers and difficult controlling impulse. Some research supports attentional control problems in some aggressive youth. These effects are small however, accounting for a limited about of the variation among individuals.

Temperament

Problematic temperament includes Intense negative emotions High activity level Lack of behavioral control and inhibition Irritability Distractability (One group of kids are callous and emotional kids. These youth feel neither guilt not empathy and sympathy for their victims. They can be charming but insincere.)

Gordon Allport

Psychologist Gordon Allport suggested a ladder from stereotypes to hate and harm: -Antilocution. Antilocution occurs when an in-group talks about negative images of an out-group, usually with like-minded acquaintances and friends. Hate speech, racial epithets, and ethnic jokes are included in this stage. Although "private" speech itself may not be directly harmful, it sets the stage for more severe outlets for prejudice. -Avoidance. Members of the in-group actively avoid people in the out-group. No direct harm may be intended, but psychological harm often results through isolation and social exclusion. Avoidance can be inconvenient to self and the avoided group. Keeping to "one's own kind" -Discrimination. The out-group is discriminated against by denying them opportunities and services, putting prejudice into action. Behaviors have the intention of disadvantaging the out-group by preventing them from achieving goals, getting education or jobs, voting, traveling freely, etc. -Physical Attack. The in-group vandalizes, burns, or otherwise destroys out-group property and carries out violent attacks on individuals or groups. Physical harm is done to members of the out-group. -Extermination. The in-group seeks extermination or removal of the out-group. They attempt to eliminate either the entirety or a large fraction of the undesired group of people.

Jonathan Haight

Psychologist Jonathan Haight has posited several universal ethical struggles: Fairness & Reciprocity struggles involve cheating, cooperation, and deception. Their associated values are: Justice, honesty, trustworthiness Harm & Care struggles involve situations of suffering, distress, threats to others. The associated values are Caring & Kindness In-group & Loyalty struggles involve threats to group and traitors. The associate values are loyalty, patriotism, and self-sacrifice Authority & Respect struggles involve smooth functioning of group organizations and hierarchies. Purity & Sanctity struggles involve taboos and spoilage. The associated virtues are temperance, chastity, piety, cleanliness

Self-regulation

Self-regulation is the ability to control our impulses by managing our emotional states and our reactions to others and situations. Self-regulation has two facets: Inhibition of responses Marshalling of behavior

Morality and emotions

Sometimes our moral decisions are little more than gut feelings that something is wrong. It is hard not to see the connection between emotions and morality. The emotions of Empathy, Sympathy, and Guilt, for example, are inextricably connected to the various aspects of moral resolve, such as caring, compassion, confession, acknowledgment, and accountability, resistance to deviation, and restitution. This suggests that aspects of emotion regulation may play a role in character.

Stereotype threat

Stereotype threat is a one of the most widely studied topics in the field of social psychology. It has been shown to reduce the performance of individuals who belong to negatively stereotyped groups. It is a situational predicament in which people are or feel themselves to be at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group and race or other minority group statuses is made salient in the situation. If negative stereotypes are present regarding a specific group, group members are likely to become anxious about their performance even if the are imminently well-qualified or over-qualified. this anxiety may hinder their ability to perform at their maximum level. It is a potential contributing factor to long-standing racial and gender gaps in academic performance.

Aggression during preschool

Temper tantrums diminish during the preschool period and are mostly gone by 4 years. Growth in language permits verbal. Aggression peaks about 3 years of age and begins declining. Aggression changes from cold to hot.

Correlates of Persistent Aggression

Temperament and Biology

Hormonal Factors

Testosterone is assumed to play a role in persistent aggressiveness. But these effects have been hard to establish. Testosterone is related to activity level however, so if children have a difficult time controlling and inhibiting their activity and arousal, testosterone may play a role.

Television and media w/ aggresssion

The average preschooler will see thousands of murders on TV before reaching maturity. Videogames contain violence as well. Children who watch a great deal of television and children who play violent videogames and identify with violent characters see aggression as more acceptable and less harmful than other children. They are also more likely to be more aggressive themselves, although the effects, while reliable, are small.

Regulating initiative & arousal

The fact that moral behavior requires marshaling the will to act is sometimes under-appreciated. But people who are constantly under-aroused about social justice and other issues can have a lack of attention, lack of motivation, lack of appropriate guilt, and a lack of empathy. These are necessary to act morally.

classic doll studies done in the 1940s by Kenneth and Maime Clark

They conducted a series of experiments to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children by giving white and black children opportunities to play with white versus black identical dolls. When they were interviewed later, the children seemed to prefer the white dolls--even the black children--and they reported that the white dolls were more desirable. This study has some methodological flaws but its basic conclusion seems intact. It illustrated the damage caused by systematic segregation and racism on children's self-perception at the young age of five. And played a role in the supreme court's rejection of the "separate but equal doctrine." It eventually and directly resulting in the controversial integration of the University of Alabama and Gov Wallace's infamous "stand in the school house door".

the study of Dienstbier, Hillman, Lehnhoff, Hillman, and Valkenaar (1975)

To understand the results of Dienstbier, Hillman, Lehnhoff, Hillman, and Valkenaar (1975) experiment, we need to understand children's attributions for their own behavior. Attribution theorists hold views on discipline quite opposite that of behavioral reinforcement and punishment theorists. In particular, they have stressed that for children to acquire new behaviors and especially for them to resist temptation and engage in prosocial behavior it is important that children feel ownership over the behavior in question. According to the theory, children strive constantly to understand their own (as well as others') behavior and make attributions to internal, stable, external, unstable, etc. causes. The conclusions they reach are important for predicting their subsequent behavior. In the case of resisting doing something wrong, application of attribution theory would suggest the following implications: Children resist deviant behavior if they can think of a good reason for doing so. If children believe that they are inherently a good person and that good people do not engage in the kind of misbehavior they are contemplating, then they will resist (this would violate their own self-image of themselves as a good person) But, if children who are thinking of deviating can only think of a good external reason for not doing so, then they deviate when the likelihood of being caught is slim.

The Victim-Perpetrator perception gap (Baumeister)

Victims see their act as: Arbitrary, gratuitous, incomprehensible Long lasting effects on them Part of chain Reaction Justified Severity great Community recognition Perpetrators see the act as: Meaningful and understandable Over, without lasting implications for the victims Isolated Overreaction or motivated by something else (money, politics, etc) Severity minor or imagined Community distance

A Case Study

We developed a case study of Lonnie. Lonnie's family demographics, which we discussed, carry some of the risk factors that have been found to be implicated in the development of aggression in the family context. But according to Patterson, these are neither sufficient nor necessary to explain Lonnie's behavior. Patterson (1982) coined the term coercive family process to describe a family pattern composed of the interaction between ineffective parent management skills and escalating child behavior problems. To illustrate this we considered a lengthy dialogue between Lonnie and his mother and a second, lengthy dialogue between Lonnie' older brother Ray and his mom. By looking closely at how Lonnie and his brother interact with their mother, we illustrated several key points about Patterson's Model, which posits that the effectiveness in which parents manage the aggressive and noncompliance behaviors of their children plays a critical role in the course of those behaviors as the child grows. In the coercive family, as the children's aggressive behaviors grow more and more frequent and increasingly intense, the parents' attempts to manage them become increasingly inadequate. Two problems surface: ineffective parental management of aggressive and noncompliant behavior the reinforcement of coercive child behaviors Sometimes the reinforcement is through some form of positive regard from the parent for the coercive behavior, or through tacit approval at the very least. According to Patterson, however, most of the reinforcement arises out of "escape contingencies", or what has been called an attack, counter-attack, positive outcome sequence.

Mode

aggression can be physical, verbal, or relational. Physical aggression and harm -- these affect a person's physical well-being and include hitting, kicking, shoving and so on. Relational aggression and harm -- these affect a person's social sanding and inclusion. The include leaving someone out, embarrasing and himiliating them and so on.

Moral transgressions

are transgressions around fairness, harm, and justice

What is aggression?

ggression is behavior that is designed to harm or injure another human being who is motivated to avoid such treatment. It an be distinguished from assertiveness, which is behavior motivated acts in furtherance of legitimate interest of individuals or groups that respect the rights of others. Aggression includes bullying but they are also distinct. A student is being bullied or victimized when he or she is exposed, repeatedly and over time, to aggression from one or more peers (or adults). Thus bullying is aggression but aggression is more than that. With bullying, there is an imbalance of power (Physical, Age, Intellect, Popularity, ec.). Bullying can be organized and systematic or spontaneous. But it is always repetitive, occurring over a period of time.

personal transgressions

imprudent behavior or lapses in decisions regarding self-interest, personal health, and safety.

Hypocrisy

nconsistency in moral behavior in different settings Inconsistency between words and deeds Rationalizations of problematic behavior to deflect criticism or accountability. Claims to not remember, distracting counterattacks, blaming others or fake news, denying that ever one said, hurt, or mocked someone. Disingenuous behavior to appear virtuous or impressive. Exaggerating one's accomplishments or prominence or behaving altruistically when the actual motive is not what it seems and much more selfish, to get elected for example

Lynn Liben

she presented 6 through 11 year olds with traditionally male and traditionally females occupations. She asked boys and girls with jobs had more prestige, were more impressive, and had the best future. Both boys and girls felt men's jobs were more prestigious, yet girls preferred the less prestigious jobs. Why? Because they were jobs for men or because men's jobs are better? She couldn't tell. So she did a second study. This time she told the kids about fictitious jobs. The kids could not have any experience with the jobs. They were unfamiliar. Sometimes the kids saw many examples of men doing the jobs and sometimes they saw many examples of women doing the SAME job. Kids felt any job done mostly by women must be less prestigious and less desirable. Also, girls still preferred the less prestigious jobs. These studies seem to show that there is a negative prejudice against women's jobs and that girls feel they are not suited to high prestige jobs.

Inhibition of impulses before their nature and consequences are fully appreciated.

t is not difficult to see how the ability to inhibit impulse and resist temptation is related to moral behavior. This is a slowly developing skill, and one in which people differ and consequently a skill that helps explain moral behavior. In one famous experiment, for example, Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University offered a child a choice between one small reward provided immediately or a better reward later if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. The reward was a marshmallow or a pretzel. All children hoped to wait for the larger reward, but many were unable to do so. Children did better if they distracted themselves or if the experimenter used abstract objects to stand for the reward itself rather than make the children stare at the actual reward while waiting. In follow-up studies, children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, and better moral development.

Social transgressions

transgressions around customs or regulations designed to ensure smooth social coordination and social organization.