Vatsala Saxena. Department of Psychology. University of Delhi. India

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Cultural morality : From Margins to the Centre stage Vatsala Saxena Department of Psychology University of Delhi India Abstract This is a theoretical paper which highlights the contributions of early

1 Cultural morality : From Margins to the Centre stage Vatsala Saxena Department of Psychology University of Delhi India Abstract This is a theoretical paper which highlights the contributions of early researchers in the field of moral psychology. It emphasizes how initially morality was considered universal in nature, and was limited to the idea of harm and fairness. The paper provides research evidences for crosscultural differences in the conceptualization of morality. It urges to expand the domain of morality beyond harm and fairness to include other culturally relevant values. The paper outlines the cultural models of morality in the field of psychology. Keywords: morality, culture, psychology. 748

2 Introduction Morality is not just a subject matter of psychology; but of many other fields like philosophy, law, theology, sociology, anthropology to name some. However, for long it has been studied in a cultural vacuum. The pioneer in the field of study was Piaget (1932/1965) who conducted classical open ended clinical interviews. He questioned children about rules of the marble games, if they could be changed under any circumstance.on the basis of his interviews he proposed two broad stages of moral understanding: (a) Heteronomous morality (5 10 years): Moral rules at this stage are considered to be handed down by authorities (god, parents, and teacher) and are non-negotiable. Further, children at this stage focus on outcomes than on intent to harm, (b) Autonomous morality (10 years and above): Moral rules are considered to be a result of the cooperative understanding among people, and are not imposed by the external forces. Later, Kohlberg (1969, 1981) further elaborated Piaget s work using clinical interviewing procedure. He presented his participants with moral dilemmas, and emphasized on how the individual reasons about the dilemma rather than the content of the response.on the basis of the reasoning which was provided, Kohlberg proposed three broad levels of moral understanding, each of which is further sub-divided into two stages: Level I (Pre-conventional): It is the lowest level, which is dominated by egoism (keeping self in the centre/ considering the benefit of self). Here morality is considered to be externally controlled.the two sub-stages within it are Punishment and obedience orientation, andinstrumental purpose orientationlevel 2 (Conventional): At this level individuals continue to regard conformity to social rules as important. However, at this stage it is not for the reasons of self-interest, rather it is for the believe that actively maintaining the current social system shall ensure positive human relationships and social order. The sub-stages in this case are Good boy-good girl orientation and Social-order maintaining orientation.level 3: (Post-conventional): At this level the action is judged by reference to abstract, objective principles which are detached from the self or one s society but are applicable at a universal level to all societies and cultures. The final two sub-stages under level 3 are Social contract orientationandthe universal ethical principle orientation According to Kohlberg, principles of justice (which simply means to refrain from violating others rights) are socially enforceable duties which everyone is bound to fulfil, failing which 749

3 the person shall be considered immoral. However interpersonal obligations, which means to care or being responsive to other s needs was seen as too broad a domain which can over-tax an individual s resources and might constraint his own rights. Thus, the interpersonal responsibilities were assumed to be subordinate to the justice obligations.gilligan (1982) criticizes Kohlberg for this subjugation of interpersonal morality. According to her Kohlberg s stages of moral development relegates women to lower levels of moral development, as women are more care oriented. Gilligan (1982, p. 18) writes, The very traits that traditionally have defined the goodness of women, their care for and sensitivity to the needs of others, are those that mark them as deficient in moral development. Nevertheless, despite controversies and disagreements Gilligan (1982) just like Piaget (1932/1965), and Kohlberg (1969/1981) believed in a universal definition of morality. Moral ruleshave been formally defined by Turiel (1983, p3) as, Prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other. In fact Turiel and colleagues went a step further to specify that only rules related to harm and justice are moral in nature, while all other rules are social conventions. According to them moral rules are generalizable across time and place, and are authority independent; while conventions are situational and dependent on authority. For example, in two of the initial studies, the first conducted with preschool children (Nucci& Turiel, 1978), and the second with preschool children in the Virgin Islands (Nucci, Turiel, &Gawrych, 1983),participants were questioned about spontaneously occurring moral and social conventional transgressions that they had observed. The children were asked, what if there were no rule in the school about (the observed event, examples of which are given below), would it be right to do it then? When questioned about social conventional transgressions, 81% American preschool children (Nucci& Turiel, 1978) and 82% Virgin Islands preschool children (Nucci et al., 1983) stated that the act would be right if no rule existed in the school. When questioned about moral transgressions, 86% American preschool children (Nucci&Turiel, 1978) and 85% Virgin Islands preschool children (Nucci et al., 1980) stated that the act would not be right even if no rule existed. However, in recent times there has been a plethora of studies challenging the universal notion of morality, and the so-called strict distinction between moral and conventions. Both by 750

4 showing that morality can extend beyond harm and justice; and by showing how even the socalled moral rules need not generalize across situations. Dunfield and Kuhlmeier (2010)intheir study found that infants shared their things on the basis of their previous interaction with the partner. The infants showed significant preference to share their toys with those who showed positive intentions towards them. In other words sharing in children, like adults was found to be inspired by intention-based reciprocity. Further, Kouchaki1 and Smith (2013) in their study showed that something as trivial as the time of the day can influence moral judgements. These researchers showed in their study that people tend to be more moral in the morning time than in the afternoon. They termed it as morning morality effect. According to them, as the time passes there is a depletion of moral awareness and selfcontrol, thus the capacity to resist moral temptation reduces. In another study, An andtrafimow (2014) studied cross cultural difference between Koreans and Americans in their moral attributions. For this purpose they used Kantian approach of perfect and imperfect duty violations. The researchers provided hypothetical situations with characters who were presumed to be positive in nature (e.g. loyal, honest, and friendly). The participants were then asked how many violations of a perfect duty (loyalty, honesty) or imperfect duty (friendliness, charitableness) should the character in the situation do, before the participant will judge him negatively. It was found that Americans gave more attributional weightage to the violation of perfect duties than imperfect duties (i.e. less number of perfect duty violations are needed than imperfect duty violations for the character to be judged negatively). However, in case of Koreans no such difference in attributional weightage was found. This difference in the attribution style can be explained by referring to the crosscultural literature.on the similar line, cross cultural differences are shown in another study conducted by Paiva (2008). In this study, parental training programs in U.K were critiqued for not taking into account the child-rearing practices in South-Asian cultures (in this study Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi families residing in U.K participated), thus rendering them useless for this population residing in U.K. The British parental training programs emphasize on praise as one of the primary positive reinforcement for developing self-regulation and a positive self-image in children. However, the South Asian cultures subscribe to a relational model, wherein emphasis is on the community ; and on values like respect for parents, obedience, fulfilling parental expectations. Here success is seen not in individual terms but as 751

5 a credit brought to the entire family or community. Therefore, in these communities praise, or verbal approval is first of all given rarely to the children, as parents consider that this might result in pride in the children, and thus making him less sensitive to others. While, even if verbal praise is delivered, it focuses on the parental emotions, desires, and wishes (e.g. how the child s action has made the mother happy or proud), than on child s accomplishment. Thus, we see how child-rearing practices in different cultures are partly based on the moral principles followed by that culture. In an endeavour to accommodate such cultural differences in determining what comprises the moral domain; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, and Park (1997) gave three ethics of moral discourse. These are the ethics of autonomy, community, and divinity. In the ethic of autonomy the moral world is assumed to be made up exclusively of individual human beings, and the purpose of moral regulation is to protect the zone of discretionary choice of individuals and to promote the exercise of individual will in the pursuit of personal preferences. The ethic of community, in contrast, has a different ontological foundation. It sees the world not as a collection of individuals but as a collection of institutions, families, tribes, guilds or other groups. The purpose of moral regulation is to protect the moral integrity of the various stations or roles that constitute a society or a community, where a society or community is conceived of as a corporate entity with an identity, standing, history, and reputation of its own. Finally, the ethic of divinity is based on the ontological presupposition that God or Gods exist, and that the moral world is composed of souls housed in bodies. Each soul is a bit of God, or at least a gift from God, and so the purpose of moral regulation is to protect the soul, the spirit, the spiritual aspects of the human agent and nature from degradation (Shweder et al., 1997, p. 138).As an extension of Shweder s three ethics, the Moral foundation theory was proposed (Haidt and Joseph 2004; Haidt and Graham 2009).In their theory they tried to identify the best candidates for being the psychological foundations upon which the cultures create an enormous variety of moral systems. The five foundations, as described by Haidt and Graham (2007) are: (1) Harm/care, (2) Fairness/cheating, (3) loyalty/betrayal, (4) Authority/subversion, (5) Sanctity/ degradation. The dimensions of harm/care and fairness/cheating can be considered to lie within the domain of Shweder et al., (1997) autonomy; while loyalty/ betrayal, and authority/ 752

6 subversion seems to overlap the domain of community, and lastly sanctity/degradation seems parallel to the ethics of divinity. Conclusion Thus, it can be concluded that there is no universal omnipresent script of morality. Moral domain is just not limited to the values related to harm and justice, but includes other culturally relevant values. Similarly, moral rules need not generalize to all situational contexts rather it is sensitive to situational factors. What might be moral in one condition, may be immoral under another. 753

7 References An, S., &Trafimow, D. (2014). Affect and Morality: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Moral Attribution. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45(3), Dunfield, K.A.,& Kuhlmeier,V.A. (2010). Intention-Mediated Selective Helping in Infancy. Psychological Science, 21(4), Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women s development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2009). Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality. In J. Jost, A. C. Kay, & H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification. (pp ). New York: Oxford University Press. Haidt, J., & Joseph, C. (2004). Intuitive ethics: How innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues [Special issue]. Daedalus, 133, doi: / Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive developmental approach to socialization. In D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory. Chicago: Rand McNally. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice (vol.1). San Francisco: Harper & Row. 754

8 Kouchaki, M., & Smith, I. H. (2014). The morning morality effect: The influence of time of day on unethical behaviour. Psychological Science, 25, Nucci, L., & Turiel, E. (1978). Social interactions and the development of socialconcepts in preschool children. Child Development, 49, Nucci, L., Turiel, E. &Encarnacion-Gawrych, G. (1983). Children s social interactionsand social concepts in the Virgin Islands. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology,14, Paiva, N. D. (2008). South Asian parents constructions of praising their children. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 13, Piaget, J. (1932/1965). The moral judgment of the child. New York: Free Press. Shweder, R. A.,Much, N. C.,Mahapatra,M.,&Park, L. (1997). The big three of morality (autonomy, community, and divinity) and the big three explanations of suffering. In A. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health (pp ). New York: Routledge. Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 755

Moral Development November 7, 2006

Slide 1 Moral Development November 7, 2006 Slide 2 What Is Moral Development? Changes in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors regarding standards of right and wrong An intrapersonal dimension: regulates activities