Sexual Attitudes in Perspective:
THE INSIGHTS OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Task: Examining Paragraph-initial sentences
A review of the paragraph initial sentences shows how experienced writers
invariably mark their paragraph topic at the beginning of each paragraph,
and how they carry out any structural promises made in the introductory
paragraph. [Note: the full introductory paragraphs are shown, as these tend to
reveal their purpose and their structural "promises" towards the end]
THE INSIGHTS OF DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Jean Piaget
According to the theories of Jean Piaget (1896-1980), the famous Swiss developmental
psychologist, we begin life as completely amoral, totally self- centered beings.
By age two, the child enters a stage of development Piaget calls the egocentric stage.....
By age seven, the child is ready to enter a new stage of development, which Piaget calls the heterogamous stage.....
As a young person enters the early teen years, he or she begins to comprehend values and apply them in original ways......
Finally, usually sometime after age 12, the young person starts moving into what Piaget calls an autonomous stage.....
Lawrence Kohlberg
Lawrence Kohlberg, another influential developmental psychologist, built on Piaget's model
of moral development and expanded it with further insights. Instead of Piaget's
egocentric, heteronomous, and autonomous stages, Kohlberg speaks of preconventional,
conventional, and postconventional stages. He then divides each of these stages into two
substages.
On the level of preconventional morality, the child responds to cultural rules and the labels of good and bad.....
When we reach the level of conventional morality, our sense of values is characterized by conformity to and maintenance of the moral conventions that are expected by one's family, group, or nation (stage 3)-regardless of the consequences......
Finally, Kohlberg describes a postconventional morality, which is very similar to Piaget’s autonomous stage......
While Kohlberg's theory is more detailed, it overlaps in many ways with Piaget's model……. What connections, if any, can you see between these two models of moral development and the value systems based on either a fixed or process world view?
Carol Gilligan
In 1982 Carol Gilligan, a Harvard psychologist, criticized Kohlberg's theory and its
conclusions, and by implication the model suggested by Piaget. She suggests that these
theories break down when applied to the ways in which women deal with moral issues.
As a result of some pilot studies of moral reasoning in women, Gilligan suggests that there is another, equally valid, moral perspective besides Kohlberg's "justice and rights" framework......
Gilligan points out that the two moral frameworks are gender related, but not gender specific. .....