in class we discussed Dilemma 1 and 3
Kohlberg Dilemmas
Form A
Dilemma IJoe is a fourteen-year-old boy who wanted to go to camp very much. His father promised him he could go if he saved up the money for it himself. So Joe worked hard at his paper route and saved up the forty dollars it cost to go to camp, and a little more besides. But just before camp was going to start, his father changed his mind. Some of his friends decided to go on a special fishing trip, and Joe's father was short of the money it would cost. So he told Joe to give him the money he had saved from the paper route. Joe didn't want to give up going to camp, so he thinks of refusing to give his father the money.
1. Should Joe refuse to give his father the money?1a. Why or why not?
2. Does the father have the right to tell Joe to give him the money?
2a. Why or why not?
3. Does giving the money have anything to do with being a good son?
3a. Why or why not?
4. Is the fact that Joe earned the money himself important in this situation?
4a. Why or why not?
5. The father promised Joe he could go to camp if he earned the money. Is the fact that the father promised the most important thing in the situation?
5a. Why or why not?
6. In general, why should a promise kept?
7. Is it important to keep a promise to someone you don't know well and probably won't see again?
7a. Why or why not?
8. What do you think is the most important thing a father should be concerned about in his relationship to his son?
8a. Why is that the most important thing?
9. In general, what should be the authority of a father over his son?
9a. Why?
10. What do you think is the most important thing a son should be concerned about in his relationship to his father?
10a. Why is that the most important thing?
11. In thinking back over the dilemma, what would you say is the most responsible thing for Joe to do in this situation?
11a. Why?
Dilemma IIJudy was a twelve-year-old girl. Her mother promised her that she could go to a special rock concert coming to their town if she saved up from baby-sitting and lunch money to buy a ticket to the concert. She managed to save up the fifteen dollars the ticket cost plus another five dollars. But then her mother changed her mind and told Judy that she had to spend the money on new clothes for school. Judy was disappointed and decided to go to the concert anyway. She bought a ticket and told her mother that she had only been able to save five dollars. That Saturday she went to the performance and told her mother that she was spending the day with a friend. A week passed without her mother finding out. Judy then told her older sister, Louise, that she had gone to the performance and had lied to her mother about it. Louise wonders whether to tell their mother what Judy did.
1. Should Louise, the older sister, tell their mother that Judy lied about the money or should she keep quiet? 1a. Why?2. In wondering whether to tell, Louise thinks of the fact that Judy is her sister. Should that make a difference in Louise's decision?
2a. Why or why not?
3. Does telling have anything to do with being a good daughter?
3a. Why or why not?
4. Is the fact that Judy earned the money herself important in this situation?
4a. Why or why not?
5. The mother promised Judy she could go to the concert if she earned the money. Is the fact that the mother promised the most important thing in the situation?
5a. Why or why not?
6. Why in general should a promise be kept?
7. Is it important to keep a promise to someone you don't know well and probably won't see again?
7a. Why or why not?
8. What do you think is the most important thing a mother should be concerned about in her relationship to her daughter?
8a. Why is that the most important thing?
9. In general, what should be the authority of a mother over her daughter?
9a. Why?
10. What do you think is the most important thing a daughter should be concerned about in her relationship to her mother?
10a. Why is that the most important thing?
11. In thinking back over the dilemma, what would you say is the most responsible thing for Louise to do in this situation?
11a. Why?
Dilemma IIIIn Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. the drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $400 for the radium and charged $4,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money and tried every legal means, but he could only get together about $2,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from if." So, having tried every legal means, Heinz gets desperate and considers breaking into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife.
1. Should Heinz steal the drug?1a. Why or why not?
2. Is it actually right or wrong for him to steal the drug?
2a. Why is it right or wrong?
3. Does Heinz have a duty or obligation to steal the drug?
3a. Why or why not?
4. If Heinz doesn't love his wife, should he steal the drug for her? Does it make a difference in what Heinz should do whether or not he loves his wife?
4a. Why or why not?
5. Suppose the person dying is not his wife but a stranger. Should Heinz steal the drug for the stranger?
5a. Why or why not?
6. Suppose it's a pet animal he loves. should Heinz steal to save the pet animal?
6a. Why or why not?
7. Is it important for people to do everything they can to save another's life?
7a. Why or why not?
8. It is against the law for Heinz to steal. Does that make it morally wrong?
8a. Why or why not?
9. In general, should people try to do everything they can to obey the law?
9a. Why or why not?
9b. How does this apply to what Heinz should do?
10. In thinking back over the dilemma, what would you say is the most responsible thing for Heinz to do?
10a. Why?
Dilemma VIITwo young men, brothers, had got into serious trouble. They were secretly leaving town in a hurry and needed money. Karl, the older one, broke into a store and stole a thousand dollars. Bob, the younger one, went to a retired old man who was known to help people in town. He told the man that he was very sick and that he needed a thousand dollars to pay for an operation. Bob asked the old man to lend him the money and promised that he would pay him back when he recovered. Really Bob wasn't sick at all, and he had no intention of paying the man back. Although the old man didn't know Bob very well, he lent him the money. So Bob and Karl skipped town, each with a thousand dollars.
1a. Which is worse, stealing like Karl or cheating like Bob?1b. Why is that worse?
2. What do you think is the worst thing about cheating the old man?
2a. why is that the worst thing?
3. In general, why should a promise be kept?
4. Is it important to keep a promise to someone you don't know well or will never see again?
4a. Why or why not?
5. Why shouldn't someone steal from a store?
6. What is the value or importance of property rights?
7. Should people do everything they can to obey the law?
7a. Why or why not?
8. Was the old man being irresponsible by lending Bob the money?
8a. Why or why not?
Kohlberg Dilemmas
Form A
Dilemma IJoe is a fourteen-year-old boy who wanted to go to camp very much. His father promised him he could go if he saved up the money for it himself. So Joe worked hard at his paper route and saved up the forty dollars it cost to go to camp, and a little more besides. But just before camp was going to start, his father changed his mind. Some of his friends decided to go on a special fishing trip, and Joe's father was short of the money it would cost. So he told Joe to give him the money he had saved from the paper route. Joe didn't want to give up going to camp, so he thinks of refusing to give his father the money.
1. Should Joe refuse to give his father the money?1a. Why or why not?
2. Does the father have the right to tell Joe to give him the money?
2a. Why or why not?
3. Does giving the money have anything to do with being a good son?
3a. Why or why not?
4. Is the fact that Joe earned the money himself important in this situation?
4a. Why or why not?
5. The father promised Joe he could go to camp if he earned the money. Is the fact that the father promised the most important thing in the situation?
5a. Why or why not?
6. In general, why should a promise kept?
7. Is it important to keep a promise to someone you don't know well and probably won't see again?
7a. Why or why not?
8. What do you think is the most important thing a father should be concerned about in his relationship to his son?
8a. Why is that the most important thing?
9. In general, what should be the authority of a father over his son?
9a. Why?
10. What do you think is the most important thing a son should be concerned about in his relationship to his father?
10a. Why is that the most important thing?
11. In thinking back over the dilemma, what would you say is the most responsible thing for Joe to do in this situation?
11a. Why?
Dilemma IIJudy was a twelve-year-old girl. Her mother promised her that she could go to a special rock concert coming to their town if she saved up from baby-sitting and lunch money to buy a ticket to the concert. She managed to save up the fifteen dollars the ticket cost plus another five dollars. But then her mother changed her mind and told Judy that she had to spend the money on new clothes for school. Judy was disappointed and decided to go to the concert anyway. She bought a ticket and told her mother that she had only been able to save five dollars. That Saturday she went to the performance and told her mother that she was spending the day with a friend. A week passed without her mother finding out. Judy then told her older sister, Louise, that she had gone to the performance and had lied to her mother about it. Louise wonders whether to tell their mother what Judy did.
1. Should Louise, the older sister, tell their mother that Judy lied about the money or should she keep quiet? 1a. Why?2. In wondering whether to tell, Louise thinks of the fact that Judy is her sister. Should that make a difference in Louise's decision?
2a. Why or why not?
3. Does telling have anything to do with being a good daughter?
3a. Why or why not?
4. Is the fact that Judy earned the money herself important in this situation?
4a. Why or why not?
5. The mother promised Judy she could go to the concert if she earned the money. Is the fact that the mother promised the most important thing in the situation?
5a. Why or why not?
6. Why in general should a promise be kept?
7. Is it important to keep a promise to someone you don't know well and probably won't see again?
7a. Why or why not?
8. What do you think is the most important thing a mother should be concerned about in her relationship to her daughter?
8a. Why is that the most important thing?
9. In general, what should be the authority of a mother over her daughter?
9a. Why?
10. What do you think is the most important thing a daughter should be concerned about in her relationship to her mother?
10a. Why is that the most important thing?
11. In thinking back over the dilemma, what would you say is the most responsible thing for Louise to do in this situation?
11a. Why?
Dilemma IIIIn Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. the drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $400 for the radium and charged $4,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money and tried every legal means, but he could only get together about $2,000, which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying, and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said, "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from if." So, having tried every legal means, Heinz gets desperate and considers breaking into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife.
1. Should Heinz steal the drug?1a. Why or why not?
2. Is it actually right or wrong for him to steal the drug?
2a. Why is it right or wrong?
3. Does Heinz have a duty or obligation to steal the drug?
3a. Why or why not?
4. If Heinz doesn't love his wife, should he steal the drug for her? Does it make a difference in what Heinz should do whether or not he loves his wife?
4a. Why or why not?
5. Suppose the person dying is not his wife but a stranger. Should Heinz steal the drug for the stranger?
5a. Why or why not?
6. Suppose it's a pet animal he loves. should Heinz steal to save the pet animal?
6a. Why or why not?
7. Is it important for people to do everything they can to save another's life?
7a. Why or why not?
8. It is against the law for Heinz to steal. Does that make it morally wrong?
8a. Why or why not?
9. In general, should people try to do everything they can to obey the law?
9a. Why or why not?
9b. How does this apply to what Heinz should do?
10. In thinking back over the dilemma, what would you say is the most responsible thing for Heinz to do?
10a. Why?
Dilemma VIITwo young men, brothers, had got into serious trouble. They were secretly leaving town in a hurry and needed money. Karl, the older one, broke into a store and stole a thousand dollars. Bob, the younger one, went to a retired old man who was known to help people in town. He told the man that he was very sick and that he needed a thousand dollars to pay for an operation. Bob asked the old man to lend him the money and promised that he would pay him back when he recovered. Really Bob wasn't sick at all, and he had no intention of paying the man back. Although the old man didn't know Bob very well, he lent him the money. So Bob and Karl skipped town, each with a thousand dollars.
1a. Which is worse, stealing like Karl or cheating like Bob?1b. Why is that worse?
2. What do you think is the worst thing about cheating the old man?
2a. why is that the worst thing?
3. In general, why should a promise be kept?
4. Is it important to keep a promise to someone you don't know well or will never see again?
4a. Why or why not?
5. Why shouldn't someone steal from a store?
6. What is the value or importance of property rights?
7. Should people do everything they can to obey the law?
7a. Why or why not?
8. Was the old man being irresponsible by lending Bob the money?
8a. Why or why not?
Gilligan's In a Different Voice
If there is such a thing as a current classic, this text is one of them. Gilligan's book is a complaint against the male centered personality psychology of Freud and Erickson, and the male centered developmental psychology of Kohlberg. Her complaint is not that it is unjust to leave women out of psychology (though she says that). Her complaint is that it is not good psychology if it leaves out half of the human race.
Gilligan proposes a stage theory of moral development for women.
If you know anything about developmental psychology, you know
stage theories are important. But in fact there are alternatives to
stage theories that we will not cover in this class. Much of the
research in current developmental psychology is not focused on
stages, and does not assume their primacy in explaining
developmental progress. Instead, many developmental psychologists look carefully at how some particular skill (e.g. drawing, abstract thinking, thinking about other people, making excuses, helping others) develops over time. Much of this research suggests that the stage theories are too simplistic in their picture of changes in skills, attributes, and competencies over time.
So where did the whole idea of stages come from? Switzerland and Jean Piaget. Piaget was a careful observer of children's thought and behavior in a wide variety of circumstances. His work is so vast that any claim to describe it in a few pages must fail. So I won't. I will instead talk about Piaget-for-us, which is fine, since American psychologists have regularly borrowed from Piaget what they liked and left much behind. For us, Piaget's central claim was that increases in reasoning skill over time were punctuated by shifts in perspective that could only be called qualitative change from one stage (or "type," if you will) of thinking to another. This is a thoroughly cognitive theory; Piaget could ignore the behaviorists from his mountain fastness in Switzerland. For Piaget, children start out as concrete and egocentric thinkers (infants even have to learn that objects persist when they are out of sight). As they gain more cognitive ability with age, they begin to be able to "decenter" and see things from another perspective. But they are still concrete in their approach to things. More experience and (here is a key) some cognitive reorganization eventually allow most people to become abstract thinkers.
So what does this have to do with Carol Gilligan and women? We are getting there. Gilligan was a colleague of Lawrence Kohlberg at Harvard. Kohlberg had applied Piaget's theory to the development of moral thinking. Borrowing from Piaget's "preoperational/concrete/formal" distinctions Kohlberg came up with the stage theory you see here.
The preconventional moral stage, says Kohlberg, is based on the cognitive abilities of a person in Piaget's concrete operational stage. Moral decisions are egocentric (based on me) and concrete. So you can see how reward and punishment are the typical bases of reasoning in this stage. The conventional stage is based on the children's ability to "decenter" their moral universe and take the moral perspective of their parents and other important members of society into account. The postconventional stage is based on the adult's ability to base morality on the logic of principled decision making based on standards that are thought to be universalizable and not dependent on culture. Kohlberg's system was based on extensive research he and his students did with interviews in which they asked children and adults to give the reasons they had for moral decisions Kohlberg presented them with. So his stages and ages do not correspond exactly from Piaget, but you can see a tantalizing similarity.
Now we finally get to Gilligan. As a student of Kohlberg's, Gilligan was taken by the stage theory approach to understanding moral reasoning. But she disagreed with her mentor's assessment of the content of the moral system within which people developed. If you look at the table of Kohlberg's stages, you can see the question being answered in the third column is one of justice - the fourth stage gives this away with talk about duty and guilt. "What are the rules of the game?" seems to be the issue at hand. From her careful interviews with women making momentous decisions in their lives, Gilligan concluded that these women were thinking more about the caring thing to do rather than the thing the rules allowed. So she thought Kohlberg was all wet, at least with regard to women's development in moral thinking.
What set her off in thinking this was the fact that in some of Kohlberg's investigations, women turned out to score lower - less developed - than did men. Were women really moral midgets? Gilligan did not think so. In taking this stand, she was going against the current of a great deal of psychological opinion. Our friend Freud thought women's moral sense was stunted because they stayed attached to their mothers. Another great developmental theorist, Erik Erickson, thought the tasks of development were separation from mother and the family. If women did not succeed in this scale, then they were obviously deficient.
Gilligan's reply was to assert that women were not inferior in their personal or moral development, but that they were different. They developed in a way that focused on connections among people (rather than separation) and with an ethic of care for those
Thus Gilligan produces her own stage theory of moral development for women. Like Kohlberg's, it has three major divisions: preconventional, conventional, and post conventional. But for Gilligan, the transitions between the stages are fueled by changes in the sense of self rather than in changes in cognitive capability. Remember that Kohlberg's approach is based on Piaget's cognitive developmental model. Gilligan's is based instead on a modified version of Freud's approach to ego development. Thus Gilligan is combining Freud (or at least a Freudian theme) with Kohlberg & Piaget.
In reading Gilligan and understanding her place in psychology, you may yourself come face to face with an intellectual difficulty. The momentous life decision that Gilligan looks at in her central study was that of whether or not to get an abortion. It seems clear from Gilligan's comments in her text that she is a supporter of a women's right to choose. Those of you who agree with her will have less trouble seeing the logic of her system. Those of you who disagree will have to get past the disagreement on this important ethical issue to see if there is anything interesting psychologically in what Gilligan has to say.
Here is my pitch for the psychologically interesting. Gilligan has shown that Kohlberg's (and Freud's, and Erickson's) systems are based on a male-centered view. Kohlberg built his theory based on interviews with males only. She has certainly shown us the inadequacy of that. In addition, she has broken the idea that there is only one dimension of moral reasoning. If there can be two, why not three? Why not several? Finally, she has connected moral decision making back into concerns about both the self and the social environment in which the self lives.
One more item before we get to the book itself. Most psychologists now disagree with the empirical claim that men and women differ in their moral reasoning in the way Gilligan outlines. Several studies have now found both men and women using both justice and care dimensions in their moral reasoning. There have also been criticisms of the rigor of her interview method of research. More careful researchers are now cleaning up behind the trail she blazed.
Gilligan's argument in the text
The first chapter is the most dense and will require the closest attention. But you will find choice tidbits here about her opinion of Freud and Erickson. And you will find what she uses of Freud's approach and what she discards. Her basic claim is that women have no place in these earlier theories and that this is why women's development has been considered an aberration from the normal. Make sure you follow the logic of her critique of the "fear of success" issue. This is a classic critique of psychological theory: women are different, but they are not thereby inferior. Toward the end of the chapter she introduces us to a favorite form of argument: extensive quotes from interviews with interspersed comment. As you read these quotes try to decide if you see the same thing in them that Gilligan sees.Images of relationship introduces us to a central claim that Gilligan wants to make: men and women view relationship differently. Current research agrees with Gilligan that there is a difference, but the difference is more complex than Gilligan suggests (or can suggest) in this chapter. The TAT study is a classical social science style experiment. Different conditions produce a difference in the measured variable. However take a close look at the percentage differences she reports. How large are they?
In concepts of self and morality Gilligan introduces the abortion study and lays out the sequence of development you saw in the table above. You have two basic issues to grapple with here. First, make sure you understand how Gilligan's system is both similar to and different from Kohlberg's. How does the meaning of conventional change from one system to the other? Second, make sure you understand how the woman's self concept is involved in each of the stages and in the transition from each stage to the next.
We only read the first three chapters, since this is the heart of Gilligan's argument. Those of you considering going on in psychology, in women's studies, or in other social science fields should at least consider finishing the book
If there is such a thing as a current classic, this text is one of them. Gilligan's book is a complaint against the male centered personality psychology of Freud and Erickson, and the male centered developmental psychology of Kohlberg. Her complaint is not that it is unjust to leave women out of psychology (though she says that). Her complaint is that it is not good psychology if it leaves out half of the human race.
Gilligan proposes a stage theory of moral development for women.
If you know anything about developmental psychology, you know
stage theories are important. But in fact there are alternatives to
stage theories that we will not cover in this class. Much of the
research in current developmental psychology is not focused on
stages, and does not assume their primacy in explaining
developmental progress. Instead, many developmental psychologists look carefully at how some particular skill (e.g. drawing, abstract thinking, thinking about other people, making excuses, helping others) develops over time. Much of this research suggests that the stage theories are too simplistic in their picture of changes in skills, attributes, and competencies over time.
So where did the whole idea of stages come from? Switzerland and Jean Piaget. Piaget was a careful observer of children's thought and behavior in a wide variety of circumstances. His work is so vast that any claim to describe it in a few pages must fail. So I won't. I will instead talk about Piaget-for-us, which is fine, since American psychologists have regularly borrowed from Piaget what they liked and left much behind. For us, Piaget's central claim was that increases in reasoning skill over time were punctuated by shifts in perspective that could only be called qualitative change from one stage (or "type," if you will) of thinking to another. This is a thoroughly cognitive theory; Piaget could ignore the behaviorists from his mountain fastness in Switzerland. For Piaget, children start out as concrete and egocentric thinkers (infants even have to learn that objects persist when they are out of sight). As they gain more cognitive ability with age, they begin to be able to "decenter" and see things from another perspective. But they are still concrete in their approach to things. More experience and (here is a key) some cognitive reorganization eventually allow most people to become abstract thinkers.
So what does this have to do with Carol Gilligan and women? We are getting there. Gilligan was a colleague of Lawrence Kohlberg at Harvard. Kohlberg had applied Piaget's theory to the development of moral thinking. Borrowing from Piaget's "preoperational/concrete/formal" distinctions Kohlberg came up with the stage theory you see here.
The preconventional moral stage, says Kohlberg, is based on the cognitive abilities of a person in Piaget's concrete operational stage. Moral decisions are egocentric (based on me) and concrete. So you can see how reward and punishment are the typical bases of reasoning in this stage. The conventional stage is based on the children's ability to "decenter" their moral universe and take the moral perspective of their parents and other important members of society into account. The postconventional stage is based on the adult's ability to base morality on the logic of principled decision making based on standards that are thought to be universalizable and not dependent on culture. Kohlberg's system was based on extensive research he and his students did with interviews in which they asked children and adults to give the reasons they had for moral decisions Kohlberg presented them with. So his stages and ages do not correspond exactly from Piaget, but you can see a tantalizing similarity.
Now we finally get to Gilligan. As a student of Kohlberg's, Gilligan was taken by the stage theory approach to understanding moral reasoning. But she disagreed with her mentor's assessment of the content of the moral system within which people developed. If you look at the table of Kohlberg's stages, you can see the question being answered in the third column is one of justice - the fourth stage gives this away with talk about duty and guilt. "What are the rules of the game?" seems to be the issue at hand. From her careful interviews with women making momentous decisions in their lives, Gilligan concluded that these women were thinking more about the caring thing to do rather than the thing the rules allowed. So she thought Kohlberg was all wet, at least with regard to women's development in moral thinking.
What set her off in thinking this was the fact that in some of Kohlberg's investigations, women turned out to score lower - less developed - than did men. Were women really moral midgets? Gilligan did not think so. In taking this stand, she was going against the current of a great deal of psychological opinion. Our friend Freud thought women's moral sense was stunted because they stayed attached to their mothers. Another great developmental theorist, Erik Erickson, thought the tasks of development were separation from mother and the family. If women did not succeed in this scale, then they were obviously deficient.
Gilligan's reply was to assert that women were not inferior in their personal or moral development, but that they were different. They developed in a way that focused on connections among people (rather than separation) and with an ethic of care for those
Thus Gilligan produces her own stage theory of moral development for women. Like Kohlberg's, it has three major divisions: preconventional, conventional, and post conventional. But for Gilligan, the transitions between the stages are fueled by changes in the sense of self rather than in changes in cognitive capability. Remember that Kohlberg's approach is based on Piaget's cognitive developmental model. Gilligan's is based instead on a modified version of Freud's approach to ego development. Thus Gilligan is combining Freud (or at least a Freudian theme) with Kohlberg & Piaget.
In reading Gilligan and understanding her place in psychology, you may yourself come face to face with an intellectual difficulty. The momentous life decision that Gilligan looks at in her central study was that of whether or not to get an abortion. It seems clear from Gilligan's comments in her text that she is a supporter of a women's right to choose. Those of you who agree with her will have less trouble seeing the logic of her system. Those of you who disagree will have to get past the disagreement on this important ethical issue to see if there is anything interesting psychologically in what Gilligan has to say.
Here is my pitch for the psychologically interesting. Gilligan has shown that Kohlberg's (and Freud's, and Erickson's) systems are based on a male-centered view. Kohlberg built his theory based on interviews with males only. She has certainly shown us the inadequacy of that. In addition, she has broken the idea that there is only one dimension of moral reasoning. If there can be two, why not three? Why not several? Finally, she has connected moral decision making back into concerns about both the self and the social environment in which the self lives.
One more item before we get to the book itself. Most psychologists now disagree with the empirical claim that men and women differ in their moral reasoning in the way Gilligan outlines. Several studies have now found both men and women using both justice and care dimensions in their moral reasoning. There have also been criticisms of the rigor of her interview method of research. More careful researchers are now cleaning up behind the trail she blazed.
Gilligan's argument in the text
The first chapter is the most dense and will require the closest attention. But you will find choice tidbits here about her opinion of Freud and Erickson. And you will find what she uses of Freud's approach and what she discards. Her basic claim is that women have no place in these earlier theories and that this is why women's development has been considered an aberration from the normal. Make sure you follow the logic of her critique of the "fear of success" issue. This is a classic critique of psychological theory: women are different, but they are not thereby inferior. Toward the end of the chapter she introduces us to a favorite form of argument: extensive quotes from interviews with interspersed comment. As you read these quotes try to decide if you see the same thing in them that Gilligan sees.Images of relationship introduces us to a central claim that Gilligan wants to make: men and women view relationship differently. Current research agrees with Gilligan that there is a difference, but the difference is more complex than Gilligan suggests (or can suggest) in this chapter. The TAT study is a classical social science style experiment. Different conditions produce a difference in the measured variable. However take a close look at the percentage differences she reports. How large are they?
In concepts of self and morality Gilligan introduces the abortion study and lays out the sequence of development you saw in the table above. You have two basic issues to grapple with here. First, make sure you understand how Gilligan's system is both similar to and different from Kohlberg's. How does the meaning of conventional change from one system to the other? Second, make sure you understand how the woman's self concept is involved in each of the stages and in the transition from each stage to the next.
We only read the first three chapters, since this is the heart of Gilligan's argument. Those of you considering going on in psychology, in women's studies, or in other social science fields should at least consider finishing the book
Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development
KOHLBERG'S MORAL STAGES
Kolberg's theory specifies six stages of moral development, arranged in three levels.
Level I: Preconventional/PremoralMoral values reside in external, quasi-physical events, or in bad acts. The child is responsive to rules and evaluative labels, but views them in terms of pleasant or unpleasant consequences of actions, or in terms of the physical power of those who impose the rules.
Stage 1: Obedience and punishment orientation
Level II: Conventional/Role ConformityMoral values reside in performing the right role, in maintaining the conventional order and expectancies of others as a value in its own right.
Stage 3: Good-boy/good-girl orientation
Level III: Postconventional/Self-Accepted Moral PrinciplesMorality is defined in terms of conformity to shared standards,rights, or duties apart from supporting authority. The standards conformed to are internal, and action-decisions are based on an inner process of thought and judgement concerning right and wrong.
Stage 5: Contractual/legalistic orientation
http://ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/kohlberg.stages.html
Kolberg's theory specifies six stages of moral development, arranged in three levels.
Level I: Preconventional/PremoralMoral values reside in external, quasi-physical events, or in bad acts. The child is responsive to rules and evaluative labels, but views them in terms of pleasant or unpleasant consequences of actions, or in terms of the physical power of those who impose the rules.
Stage 1: Obedience and punishment orientation
- Egocentric deference to superior power or prestige, or a trouble-avoiding set.
- Objective responsibility.
- Right action is that which is instrumental in satisfying the self's needs and occasionally others'.
- Relativism of values to each actor's needs and perspectives.
- Naive egalitarianism,orientation to exchange and reciprocity.
Level II: Conventional/Role ConformityMoral values reside in performing the right role, in maintaining the conventional order and expectancies of others as a value in its own right.
Stage 3: Good-boy/good-girl orientation
- Orientation to approval, to pleasing and helping others.
- Conformity to stereotypical images of majority or natural role behavior.
- Action is evaluated in terms of intentions.
- Orientation to "doing duty" and to showing respect for authority and maintaining the given social order or its own sake.
- Regard for earned expectations of others.
- Differentiates actions out of a sense of obligation to rules from actions for generally "nice" or natural motives.
Level III: Postconventional/Self-Accepted Moral PrinciplesMorality is defined in terms of conformity to shared standards,rights, or duties apart from supporting authority. The standards conformed to are internal, and action-decisions are based on an inner process of thought and judgement concerning right and wrong.
Stage 5: Contractual/legalistic orientation
- Norms of right and wrong are defined in terms of laws or institutionalized rules which seem to have a rational basis.
- When conflict arises between individual needs and law or contract, though sympathetic to the former, the individual believes the latter must prevail because of its greater functional rationality for society, the majority will and welfare.
- Orientation not only toward existing social rules, but also toward the conscience as a directing agent, mutual trust and respect, and principles of moral choice involving logical universalities and consistency.
- Action is controlled by internalized ideals that exert a pressure to act accordingly regardless of the reactions of others in the immediate environment.
- If one acts otherwise, self-condemnation and guilt result.
http://ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/kohlberg.stages.html
Brainstorm Part 2
In this talk, Dan Goleman, who developed the theory of Emotional Intelligence discusses Adolescent development with Dan Seigel, the author of Brainstorm. The point is that developing the Mindsight tools helps the adolescent brain become integrated and thus develops more Emotional Intelligence.
Iaan McGilchrist RSA Animate Talk called: The Divided Brain
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