Athletes, Moral Reasoning, and the Drive to "Be Aggressive! B-E-Aggressive! B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E!"

• In Event: 61.071 - Sheraton Roundtable Session 10 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 61.071-10 - Moral Education: From Early Childhood to College Years

Abstract

For decades, psychological research on social development and sport has linked the sport context to truncated moral development and the production of aggressive individuals. The following study, however, suggests that using developmental theories that account for differentiated and complex social reasoning enables a more nuanced picture of moral reasoning in the sport context and prevents stigmatizing athletes as morally dumb jocks. Through a mixed-methods approach centered around clinical interviews, we find that both athletes and non-athletes largely disapprove of peer aggression, but that athletes – because of their intimate knowledge of the sport setting – sometimes hold different interpretations of and beliefs around physically aggressive acts and that these differences, not immature morality, explain why they approve of aggression in some settings.

Author

• Amy Banas, University of California - Berkeley