Larry Nucci

Children's social interactions in the context of moral and conventional transgressions.

NuccI, LARRY P., and Nucci, MARIA SANTIAGO. Childrens Social Interactions in the Context of Moral and Conventional Transgressions. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 403-412. Observations were made in 10 schools at the second, fifth-, and seventh-grade levels of the forms of responses teachers and children provided to moral and social conventional transgressions. A total of 439 moral and 1,045 social conventional events were observed. It was found that the responses of both teachers and children to social conventional events differed from their responses to moral events. Children were much more likely to respond to moral events than to conventional events. Their responses to moral events revolved around the intrinsic (hurtful or unjust) consequences of the actions upon victims. Childrens responses to conventional transgressions focused on aspects of the social order (that is, rules, normative expectations). Children showed an increased tendency to respond to convention with age. Teachers were more likely to respond to social conventional than to moral events. Their responses to the two forms of transgression complemented the responses made by children. Both the teacher and child forms of response to transgression changed with child age. In a second aspect of the study it was found, through interviews of children about ongoing events, that the children made a conceptual discrimination between the observed moral and conventional events.

Children's Responses to Moral and Social Conventional Transgressions in Free-Play Settings

NuccI, LARRY P., and NuccI, MARIA SANTIAGO. Childrens Responses to Moral and Social Conventional Transgressions in Free-Play Settings. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1982, 53, 1337-1342. Observations were conducted of childrens responses to naturally occurring moral and social conventional transgressions during unsupervised free play in 10 playgrounds. Findings paralleled results of previous observational studies conducted in adult-governed (school) contexts. It was found that children responded to both moral and conventional forms of transgression. Responses of both the younger (7-10-year-old) and older (11-14-year-old) children to moral transgressions revolved around the intrinsic (hurtful and unjust) consequences of acts upon victims. Childrens responses to conventional breaches, in contrast, focused on aspects of the social order (i.e., rules, normative expectations). Sex differences in the usage of specific forms of response to moral and conventional breaches were found.

Adolescent Judgments of the Personal, Prudential, and Normative Aspects of Drug Usage

Group-administered questionnaires were used to examine the social judgments of 139 9thand 12th-grade students regarding drug usage. Subjects were divided into groups on the basis of self-reported drug use. Low-drug-use and high-drug-use subjects of both grades tended to view drug use as a matter of personal discretion or prudence rather than an issue of morality or social convention. High-drug-use subjects were more likely than low-drug-use subjects to view drug use as a personal rather than prudential issue and to view the behavior as less harmful and less wrong. They were also more likely to view themselves as the only authority with regard to drug use and less likely to view parents or the law as authorities. There were no significant age effects.

Moral Cognition and Childhood Aggression

Childhood aggression is of great interest because of the impact such behavior has on the welfare of others. Recent advances in understanding the development of children’s aggressive behavior have emphasized the role of cognitive factors, since an individual’s aggressive behavior is ultimately subject to cognitive control (Dodge, 1986; Huesmann, 1988). Paradoxically, the literature on cognition and aggression has not been informed by the literature on the development of children’s moral reasoning. Instead, they have developed in two separate strands that minimally relate to one another. In large part, the lack of connection between these two literatures stems from a paradigmatic clash which has made the integration of research on cognitive correlates of childhood aggression and research on children’s moral development problematic. Recent advances in theory and research in moral development, however, offer the possibility of a rapproachment between these two paradigms.

Behavioral Disordered Children's Conceptions of Moral, Conventional, and Personal Issues.

This study employed a series of sorting tasks with 22 normal and 20 children with behavioral disorders (BD) to determine whether BD children discriminate among three classes of social actions viewed by normal children as distinct. These categories are (1) the moral (actions having intrinsic effects upon the rights or well-being of others), (2) the conventional (actions whose propriety is determined by social consensus), and (3) the personal (actions whose propriety is a matter of individual prerogative). Findings were that although BD children distinguished among the three forms of behavior, they differed with normals in the classifications of specific acts and in the reasons given for act classifications. Chief among these differences was the finding that BD children were less likely than normals to identify acts as within their personal domain.

Conceptual Development in the Moral and Conventional Domains: Implications for Values Education

This article reviews recent research and related theory indicating that individuals’ conceptions of social convention and morality are constructed with in distinct developmental systems emerging out of qualitatively differing environmental interactions. The research indicates that people of all ages distinguish between those actions (moral) having an intrinsic effect upon the rights or well-being of others, and actions (social conventional) whose propriety is determined by the societal context (i.e., implicit or explicit societal norms). In addition, the research demonstrates that concepts about morality and convention follow independent and distinct developmental patterns. The article discusses the limits of current values education programs (e.g., Kohlbergian, values clarification) in terms of their failure to coordinate the teaching of social values with students’ differential conceptions of morality and convention. In addition, the article presents implications for classroom management procedures, the design of social values curricula, and the measurement of social development, which flow from the position that values education differentially address the development of conceptions of morality and social convention.

Evaluating Teachers as Social Agents: Students’ Ratings of Domain Appropriate and Domain Inappropriate Teacher Responses to Transgressions

This study examined if students evaluate teachers as respondents to social transgression on the basis of whether the teacher provides responses that are concordant with the domain (i.e., moral or conventional) of the transgressions. Findings were that students rated domain appropriate (DA) teacher responses higher than domain inappropriate (DIA) or domain undifferentiated (command) responses. In addition, subjects were found to generalize their ratings of responses to their ratings of the teachers. Subjects rated teachers employing DA responses higher than subjects employing DIA responses

Integrating moral and social development within middle school social studies: a social cognitive domain approach

Eleven teachers and 254 urban middle-school students comprised the sample of this study examining the social and moral development outcomes of the integration of social cognitive domain theory within regular classroom instruction. Participating teachers were trained to construct and implement history lessons that stimulated students’ moral reasoning and conceptions of societal convention. In comparison with baselines and controls, teachers reduced didactic instruction and increased the proportion of class time devoted to small group discussions. Student engagement in transactive discourse significantly increased in participating classes with significantly greater post-test levels of moral reasoning, concepts of social convention, and cross-domain coordination. Student production of operational versus representational transacts through transactive discussion was associated with growth in moral and societal concepts. Teachers continued teaching lessons constructed in the project a year after the research ended.

Goethe's Faust Revisited: Lessons from DIT research

The argument is made that psychometric forms of assessment are essential to the large-scale adoption of developmental approaches to moral education. In this respect, the Defining Issues Test has been an invaluable tool for research and practice in moral education. However, because such instruments are based upon previous developmental research, they are by definition derivative and unsuited for basic research on moral development. In addition standardised measures, while essential to educational research on the correlates of moral growth, run the risk of reifying extant views and assumptions about morality and moral development. Thus, such measures may stand in the way of generating new knowledge and/or impeding the assimilation of alternative conceptions of morality and social development within educational research and practice. To avoid these problems, while at the same time benefiting from the utility of measures such as the DIT, requires a constant reciprocal interaction between the generation of standardised measures and basic developmental research.

Long-term effects of testosterone phenylacetate on sexual morphology and behavior in castrated male rats ☆

Abstract Male rats of proven copulatory ability were castrated and tested with females until they ceased achieving intromission. At this point one group (TP) received single injections of 10 mg testosterone propionate and a second group (TA) received single injections of 10 mg testosterone phenylacetate. Biweekly mating tests were continued until each male had failed to achieve intromission in four successive tests. A different series of male rats was castrated at 100 days of age and 7 weeks later half of the castrates received one injection of 10 mg of TP and the other half were given one injection of 10 mg of TA. On successive weeks a few males from each group were sacrificed and the seminal vesicles and penis were preserved for study. In terms of mating performance the effects of TA lasted approximately twice as long as those of TP. Seminal vesicle weight and secretory activity declined to the untreated castrate level within 2 weeks after TP injection but had not completely done so by 8 weeks after the injection of TA. Cornification of the epithelial spines on the integument of the glans penis was lost 4 weeks after TP treatment but still persisted 8 weeks after administration of TA.