The Developmental Intertwining of Aggression and Morality: Actions, Judgments, and Responses

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Aggression and morality seemingly oppose one another: an aggressive act causes the very harm that the moral act aims to avoid. But recent research has begun to reveal how much aggression and morality intertwine in healthy development. From early childhood, we regularly commit or encounter harmful actions, deem that it’s sometimes okay to harm others, and develop sophisticated ideas about how to best handle harmful conflicts.

This international symposium joins diverse methods and populations to illuminate key issues in the connections between morality and aggression. Presentations center on three core questions: (1) Why are some children both aggressive and prosocial? (2) When do children think harmful behaviors are okay? (3) How do children believe harmful conflicts should be managed?

The first talk uses a person-centered approach to examine the co-occurence of aggressive and prosocial behaviors among 4- to 6-year-olds from a large and diverse Canadian sample. The second talk presents longitudinal differences in moral evaluations across prosocial and aggressive subgroups of low-income urban U.S. preschoolers. The third talk presents interview and naturalistic data on U.S. preschoolers’ judgments about and engagement in provoked and unprovoked force. The fourth presentation uses qualitative interviews with Colombian adolescents to examine how youth interpret and evaluate responses to harmful peer conflicts.

The discussion will integrate insights from the four presentations, consider the advantages of using multiple methods and populations, and identify questions for future research on how children develop moral ideas about when to be aggressive and how to respond to others’ aggression.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chairs

• Erin Ruth Baker, State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany)

• Audun Dahl, University of California - Santa Cruz

Individual Presentations

• The co-occurrence of aggression and prosociality in kindergartners: A population-level latent class analysis - Presenting Author: Marc Jambon, Wilfrid Laurier University; Eric Duku; Magdalena Z Janus, McMaster University

• Multidimensional profiles of Head Start children's aggression predict their explanations of physical aggression - Presenting Author: Erin Ruth Baker, State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Albany); Jamie Gahtan, University at Albany, State University of New York; Qingyang Liu, Syracuse University; Rong Huang, University of Connecticut; Sumaita Salim, University at Albany, State University of New York

• When and How to Hit? Learning to Be Discerning about Force in Preschool - Presenting Author: Charles Baxley, University of California - Santa Cruz; Anna Yao, University of California, Santa Cruz; Paolina Hantke, University of California, Santa Cruz; Audun Dahl, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Youths’ Understandings and Judgments of Teachers’ Responses to Addressing Peer Harms in Schools - Presenting Author: Laura Pareja Conto, Concordia University; Ana Maria Velasquez; Vilma Escorcia Vera; Holly E Recchia, Concordia University; Gabriel Velez, Marquette University; CECILIA WAINRYB, University of Utah