Steven Crane Compiled Section Handouts. Human Behavioral Biology 2012

Long-term environmental effects on aggression

What are Kohlberg's three basic stages of moral development?

1. 
   Preconventional: concerned with what punishments and rewards follow a behavior.
   
2. 
   Conventional: concerned with the rules/laws/conventions to determine the morality of a behavior.
   
3. 
   Post-conventional: concerned with some internal sense of right and wrong behavior independent of rules/laws
   

What are some issues with Kohlberg's stages?

• 
  Based on a non-representative upper class white male sample and there are gender differences.
  
• 
  Doesn't actually predict who does the right thing in real life. What does?
  

  • Being raised with so much emphasis on doing the right thing that it's an internal, implicit sort of behavior, NOT one that you have to think out logically.

So is moral behavior a matter of will or grace?

• 
  This has nothing to do with the TV show - do the readings! :P
  
• 
  It's about grace: doing the right thing (not lying) isn't a big effortful thing that you will to happen. It's about not being tempted in the first place.
  

What does Judith Rich Harris teach us about the contexts in which we learn aggression?

• 
  It's all about the peer group and peer socialization. Less about parents (even absent fathers). Training in arbitrary distinctions of us vs. them.
  
• 
  Ex: chimps vs. gorilla actors from Planet of the Apes formed dichotomous social groups.
  

What's a good predictor of having nicer social groups in primates?

• 
  Having older individuals in the group who are models for reconciliation behavior.
  

What about your early life environment biases an individual towards seeing us vs. them distinctions easily?

• 
  Just pointing out the categories. Like "good morning boys and girls."
  

• You can overcome this by growing up with lots of contact with diverse people: contact theory.

• 
  But what are two examples that counter contact theory?
  
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