DEVELOPMENT NEED AND GIBBS' MODEL

Development Need and Gibbs' Model

Development Need and Gibbs' Model

Introduction

The emergence, socialization, and growth of morality are of major importance in the social and behavioral sciences. Psychological theories have conceptualized the processes and origins of moral development in three major ways. First, theorists posit biology as the source of moral development, the natural emergence of an empathic predisposition. Second, they locate morality's source in society, the socialization or internalization of a society's prescriptive norms and values. Third, they feature mental coordination of perspectives as the primary source, the construction of mature moral judgment. Integrative theories or comprehensive views of moral development and prosocial behavior have appeared in the early twenty-first century.

Mental Coordination of Perspectives

Accordingly, scholars have criticized the assumption that mature morality is relative to and derived exclusively from society. Rather than biology or society, the cognitive developmental theories of Jean Piaget (1896-1980) and Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) emphasize the child's mental coordination of perspectives on a situation as the source of moral development and maturity. Piaget conceptualized mature morality as the construction through social interaction of a logic or rationality inherent in social relations. The movement toward maturity is gradual and uneven, defining a rough age trend. Young children not only express empathy egocentrically but also tend to “center” on their own immediate perspective and to shift capriciously from one to another “here and now” feature of a situation. To develop toward moral rationality is to decenter, that is, mentally to coordinate situational features.

Particularly relevant to moral development is the coordination of ego's with alter's perspectives in peer conflict situations. John Flavell and colleagues have noted that social decentering or balance and breadth displace—but do not eliminate—egocentric bias in human development and behavior.

Mental coordination or construction may supplement internalization in moral development. The crosscultural universality of moral reciprocity, for example, may reflect not only widespread moral internalization of a norm (as Gouldner has asserted) but also the social construction of an ideal as children (perhaps with the help of inductive parents or coaches) interact (compare, oppose, discuss) and thereby decenter or reduce one another's egocentric biases. Piaget put it as follows: “For true equality and a genuine desire for reciprocity there must be [an ideal] that is the sui generis product of life lived in common. There must be born of the actions and reactions of individuals upon each other the consciousness of a necessary equilibrium binding upon and limiting both 'alter' and 'ego.'And this ideal equilibrium [is] dimly felt on the occasion of every quarrel and every peacemaking” (1965: 318).

In moral development, concrete forms of moral reciprocity (prescribing the reciprocation of favors or blows, or crude equality) precede the Golden Rule or ideal form (prescribing reciprocation according to how you or anyone would wish to be treated, or equity according to situational circumstances). To account for this age trend, internalization theorists would direct our attention to the possibility that children learn and internalize the ideal version of the reciprocity norm (or a separate norm of magnanimity) when ...