Sociomoral Temperament: A Mediator Between Wellbeing and Social Outcomes in Young Children

Social outcomes, such as empathy, conscience, and behavioral self-regulation, might require a baseline of psychological wellbeing. According to Triune Ethics Metatheory (TEM), early experience influences the neuropsychology underlying a child's orientation toward the social and moral world. Theoretically, a child's wellbeing, fostered through early caregiving, promotes sociomoral temperaments that correspond to the child's experience, such as social approach or withdrawal in face-to-face situations. These temperaments may represent an individual's default sociomoral perspective on the world. We hypothesized that sociomoral temperament emerges as a function of wellbeing and would be related to social outcomes measured by moral socialization and self-regulation. Further, we hypothesized that sociomoral temperament would mediate the relationship between wellbeing and social outcomes. To investigate, we collected items reflective of sociomoral temperament, asking mothers from two countries (USA: n = 525; China: n = 379) to report on their 3- to 5-year-old children. They also reported on their child's wellbeing (anxiety, depression, happiness) and social outcomes, including moral socialization (concern after wrong doing, internalized conduct and empathy) and behavioral self-regulation (inhibitory control and misbehavior). As expected, correlations identified connections between wellbeing, sociomoral temperament, and social outcomes. Mediation analyses demonstrated that sociomoral temperament mediated relations between wellbeing and social outcomes in both samples, though in slightly different patterns. Fostering early wellbeing may influence social outcomes through a child's developing sociomoral temperament.

College and the “Culture War”: Assessing Higher Education’s Influence on Moral Attitudes

Moral differences contribute to social and political conflicts. Against this backdrop, colleges and universities have been criticized for promoting liberal moral attitudes. However, direct evidence for these claims is sparse, and suggestive evidence from studies of political attitudes is inconclusive. Using four waves of data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, we examine the effects of higher education on attitudes related to three dimensions of morality that have been identified as central to conflict: moral relativism, concern for others, and concern for social order. Our results indicate that higher education liberalizes moral concerns for most students, but it also departs from the standard liberal profile by promoting moral absolutism rather than relativism. These effects are strongest for individuals majoring in the humanities, arts, or social sciences, and for students pursuing graduate studies. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for work on political conflict and moral socialization.

Beyond Autonomy? Moral Socialization Goals of German and Indonesian Preschool Teachers

The moral socialization of preschool children has so far mostly been investigated in the informal context of family, but with an increasing institutionalization of early childhood education worldwide, preschool teachers now play a prominent role as moral socialization agents. Accordingly, we investigated the institutional moral socialization of the three ethics of Autonomy, Community, and Divinity in two different cultural contexts. Preschool teachers (PTs) from urban German ( n = 73) and Indonesian ( n = 135) contexts completed a paper–pencil survey assessing their moral socialization goals for preschool children concerning the three ethics via the Ethical Values Assessment (EVA_S). Confirmatory factor analyses were carried out separately for the German and Indonesian samples and confirmed the proposed three-factor structure. Measurement invariance tests for the EVA_S indicated metric, but not scalar invariance. Thus, subsequent intra- and cross-cultural analyses were conducted with centered values. The results indicate that German PTs emphasized the ethic of Autonomy for moral socialization, while Indonesian PTs promoted the ethic of Divinity. Across cultures, Autonomy and Divinity socialization goals correlated with the PTs’ preference of the ethics in their moral reasoning. Furthermore, Divinity socialization goals were related to the PTs’ religiosity and their preschools having a religious affiliation in both cultural contexts. These findings contribute to our understanding of institutional moral socialization and cultural as well as subcultural contextual influences.

The Psychology of Filial Piety and Moral Decision-Making in Chinese People

Filial piety has served as a guiding principle of Chinese patterns of moral socialization for millennia. However, interpretation of the values and behaviors emphasized by filial beliefs has evolved with sociopolitical demands. In this chapter, the authors first review the foundations of filial piety in Chinese culture and discuss the connection with relational identity and Confucian ethics. Next, the authors focus on the psychology of filial piety and examine the ways in which filial piety is enacted in modern Chinese societies. They use the case of elder care to demonstrate how indigenous psychological research and tools can allow governments to coordinate with local values and beliefs in developing effective social policy, and they indicate how insights from the dual filial piety model may be used by education and counseling professionals to address important social issues.

Moralsk mangfold, oppvekst og livstolkning – et evolusjonspsykologisk perspektiv

In this article, I discuss the challenges of moral diversity in Norwegian public school from the perspective of Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory. I take my cue from Haidt’s distinction between individualistic and sociocentric societies and discuss some implications of this distinction with regard to the introduction of the new curriculum (fagfornyelsen, in Norwegian). I argue that the subject curriculum is rooted in a morality that is characteristic of what Haidt refers to as WEIRD societies (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rational, Democracies). My thesis is that this moral matrix rests on cultural assumptions that differ substantially from those of immigrant pupils in Norwegian schools. The particularities of sociocentric moral matrices seem to fall in the blind zone of the subject curriculum. Yet it is important that the school system acknowledge its role in the creation of a community to which every pupil might experience an allegiance. In order to create a shared value foundation, teachers need to be aware of pupils’ affiliations to different moral matrices. Thus, we need to rethink what moral socialization means in a multicultural society.

From Ingenium to Virtus: The Cultivation of Talent in Seventeenth Century Dissertations from Uppsala University

This article explores the problem of innate, natural talent vs acquired skill, knowledge, and virtue in dissertations from Uppsala University around 1680. These texts have never before been studied. It discusses questions such as: how did Swedish academics of the period conceive the relationship between ingenium (innate potential) and (acquired) virtue or knowledge? Which teaching methods did they advocate? How do the texts relate to developments in seventeenth century society? The study uses a combination of contextual analysis and a ‘history of concepts’ approach to answer these questions. The analysis reveals that the Swedish dissertations respond to contemporary debates (involving well-known authorities such as Vives, Huarte, Erasmus, and Comenius) and that they were affected by the immediate context: the growth of the early modern state and the social mobility which accompanied that growth. Education is described in Renaissance humanist terms, with a clear affinity to moral philosophical concepts such as virtue and habituation. The learning process described is analogous to the acquisition of moral virtue and education itself is to a large extent legitimated with reference to moral socialization. The educational ideas put forward balance discipline and playfulness, and represent a relatively democratic view of the distribution of human capabilities, showing a great trust in the potential of education. However, there is also a distinct stress on medical explanations of differences in individual talent.

Groups as moral boundaries: A developmental perspective

This chapter presents the perspective that social groups serve as moral boundaries. On this account, social groups establish the bounds within which people hold moral obligations toward one another. This belief—that people are morally obligated toward fellow social group members, but not toward members of other groups—is an early-emerging feature of human cognition, arising out of domain-general processes in conceptual development. This chapter reviews evidence in support of this account from the literatures on adult and child moral cognition, and describes the developmental processes by which people come to view social groups as shaping moral obligation. Suggestions regarding how this account can inform the study of social cognitive development more broadly, as well as how it can be used to promote positive moral socialization, are discussed.