Social Behaviors: Moral Development, Aggression, Peers, and Gender
Social behavior items test how children reason morally, why they help or harm, how peer status is measured, and how gender identity and sex-typed behavior develop.
Moral development
- Piaget: heteronomous morality (rules fixed, judged by consequences) gives way to autonomous morality (~10–11), where intentions matter.
- Kohlberg: preconventional (punishment/obedience; instrumental exchange), conventional (good boy–nice girl; law and order), postconventional (social contract; universal ethical principles). Most adults reason conventionally; postconventional reasoning is uncommon.
- Gilligan argued Kohlberg's scheme privileged a justice orientation and missed a care orientation; later research finds small average gender differences.
- Bandura: moral disengagement - relabeling, dehumanization, diffused responsibility.
Prosocial behavior and aggression
Empathy appears in infancy (newborn reactive crying); instrumental helping emerges around 14–18 months (Warneken & Tomasello). Instrumental aggression (to obtain something) gives way to hostile/reactive and proactive aggression. Physical aggression peaks around ages 2–3 and declines; relational aggression (exclusion, gossip) rises into early adolescence and is somewhat more common in girls. Patterson's coercive family process describes how escalating parent–child conflict reinforces aggression.
Play and peer status
Parten's sequence - solitary, onlooker, parallel, associative, cooperative - increases with age but is not strictly lockstep. Sociometric status (Coie & Dodge) from peer nominations: popular, rejected (aggressive or withdrawn), neglected, controversial, average. Rejected-aggressive children face the poorest long-term outcomes; neglected is not rejected - neglected children are often well adjusted. Friendship shifts from shared activities to intimacy and self-disclosure in adolescence (Sullivan).
Gender and social cognition
Gender identity ~2–3 years; gender stability follows; gender constancy/consistency ~5–7 (Kohlberg). Gender schema theory (Bem) emphasizes self-socialization to cultural gender categories. Sex differences are small with heavily overlapping distributions. Theory of mind: false-belief understanding consolidates around age 4; Selman's perspective-taking stages run from egocentric to societal.
Aging
Socioemotional selectivity theory (Carstensen): a shrinking perceived time horizon leads older adults to prune peripheral ties and invest in emotionally close relationships, consistent with high reported well-being and a positivity effect in attention and memory.
Worked example
A 3-year-old answers that Sally will look in the box where the marble actually is, not where Sally left it. Reasoning: she fails the false-belief task because she cannot yet represent a belief that conflicts with reality. This is a theory-of-mind milestone typically passed around 4–5, not a truthfulness or memory problem.
Traps that cost marks
- Labeling 'good boy–nice girl' reasoning as preconventional; it is conventional.
- Treating neglected status as equivalent to rejected status.
- Treating Parten's stages as rigid steps.
- Assuming relational aggression is not real aggression or is exclusive to girls.