Evolutionary Psychology: Moral Development

Theories as different as Freud's psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and learning theories adopt a non-cognitive perspective on moral development. Underlying all these theories is a dichotomous conception of the child-society system whose interests are in conflict (the personal good against the social good), so that society must guarantee social order by promoting the child's adherence to the norms of their community. In short, control comes from the social environment and is established by rules and instructions that direct the life of the individual. Freud Convinced that human nature is guided by powerful destructive impulses, Freud thought that human nature society can only survive by defending against them and protecting people from the aggressive action of others members. This opposition between the selfish and antisocial interests of the individual and those of society to be preserved is a key element of Freudian thought and its moral conception. According to Freud, in the first years of life, the child does not have any control over his impulses and it is the parents who must exercise it, limiting negative behaviors and promoting positive ones. Over time, this coercion will give way to a progressive internalization of the norms, to an entity internal to the child himself that "watches over" him. This is what Freud called the Super-ego, and explained its emergence from the intense conflicts that occur between the sexual and aggressive impulses of the child, on the one hand, and the increasing demands of the social environment, on the one hand, other. Freud highlights the importance of the resolution of the so-called Oedipus conflict for the development of moral conscience. It can be said that the Oedipus conflict arises when the child begins to experience sexual desire towards the parent of the opposite sex while feeling an intense rivalry towards his own sex. But it cannot satisfy any of these impulses since society prohibits sexual attachment to a family member and demands a control of aggressiveness in social life. In addition, the child feels threatened by the parent of his own sex, from whom he fears revenge. In the case of the male, he fantasizes about the cruel retaliation of being castrated. In girls, on the other hand, fear is less intense because they lack a penis (this is why Freud suggested that women develop a weaker moral conscience than men). In any case, boys and girls suffer tension and fear from all those irrational and unconscious forces and that forces them to redirect their impulses, repressing their aggressive drives towards the parent of their own sex and the sexual ones towards the other. Meanwhile, by identifying her with the parent of her own sex, the child maintains the fantasy of getting the sexual love of the other parent, avoiding the risk of retaliation. All this process leads the child to internalize the moral norms and values ​​of parents and society. By making these norms his own, he has acquired a level of consciousness, the Superego, which from now on will control and regulate his behavior from within. The superego also has a form of sanction much more powerful than external pressure: the feeling of guilt. According to this perspective, being moral means abiding by the norms imposed by society because its transgression entails intense negative emotions associated with the feeling of guilt. In other words, mature morality is one in which the pressure to act according to the norms ceases to be external to be internal. Empirical studies to test these hypotheses are scarce, not only because the psychoanalytic current is situated in a field far removed from systematic research, but also because of the difficulty of directly examining the validity of assumptions such as the Oedipus complex, castration anxiety in boys, or penis envy in girls. girls Currently, there are other psychoanalytic perspectives that place more emphasis on the positive aspects of the bond of affection between parents and children as a foundation of moral development that in the coercive practices of the adult. These proposals, based on Bowlby's Attachment Theory, have allowed greater empirical testing than the classical psychoanalytic hypotheses. Learning theories Most learning theories have approached the problem of morality from a common perspective that can be summarized as follows: everything that we call morality does not constitute a special case, different from other behaviors, since the same mechanisms learning basics (classical conditioning, association, etc.) by which any behavior is acquired serve to explain the so-called moral conduct. H. Eysenck argues that moral behavior is a conditioned reflex, not learned behavior in the sense that we learn habits or behaviors. According to him, the reaction of what we call moral conscience is nothing more than fear and anguish. repeatedly associated in the past with the punishment we receive for having engaged in conduct antisocial. Eysenck also proposes a biological theory to explain the differences that exist in the development and moral behavior of people: according to him, they are due to differences genetic levels of cortical activation (and susceptibility to conditioning) that make some people more prone to social conditioning than others. thus, children with more impulsive behaviors (with low cortical activation) condition more slowly and adapt less to the socialization process. However, the empirical results have not shown a stable relationship between conditionality and moral behavior. Eysenck downplays the role of learning in the process of moral conscience formation and denies that there is a moral conscience. According to Skinner, moral behavior is the result of the action of a simple behavior selection mechanism known as operant conditioning. Each person will adapt those behaviors and values ​​that have been reinforced in their own learning history, as they are the particular experiences that she has had, the type of norms to which she has been exposed and the rewards or punishments that she has received, which determines that set of behaviors called morals. More recently, Bandura's stream of social learning argues that people's social behavior cannot be explain only by these simple mechanisms and that, in reality, the most important source of social learning is the observation of the others. It would be impossible for the child to acquire all the repertoire of social behaviors that he has if he had to do it by trying each one of them. You can learn by observing what happens to others in such a way that if someone is rewarded for acting In a way, the child will tend to imitate him, while he will not do so if he observes that the model has been punished. But the child also learns what parents or others say about desirable and undesirable behaviors. Finally, he comes to regulate her own behavior through evaluative self-sanctions, that is, by comparing any possible action with the moral norms that he has internalized. > Next: Cognitive-evolutionary theories of moral development