The Psychology Book
Page 37
"Exposure to aggressive modeling is hardly cathartic."
Albert Bandura
Gender development
The social learning theory underlying Bandura’s research on childhood aggression has important implications for our understanding of the development of gender identity. According to the gender development theory, one reason why boys and girls tend to exhibit differences in their behavior is that they are treated differently by their parents (as well as other significant adults and peers). It has been shown that people unwittingly tailor their behavior toward children from birth to match their own gender-role expectations; this encourages children to behave according to what are considered gender norms.
According to Bandura’s findings, children also learn how to behave through reinforcement and observation learning. By imitating the behavior of others, children are highly likely to receive positive reinforcement for the type of behavior that is considered most appropriate to their sex. They will also be either directly or subtly discouraged from behaving in ways that are not sex-appropriate.
Although there has been some criticism of Bandura’s work (often centered on whether his idea is truly a theory of cognitive development), his findings and theories are still cited and debated half a century later, reflecting the breadth and scope of his influence. His groundbreaking contributions span many of the fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, personality theory, and even therapeutic practices. His ideas also serve as a bridge between preceding behaviorist learning theories and subsequent cognitive learning theories.
Bandura’s focus on processes such as attention, memory, and motivation marked a departure from studying only observable and measurable variables (the sole concern of behaviorists) and looked instead to the mental realm—the mind— for information about how people learn. For these reasons, Bandura is considered by many of his peers to be one of the most distinguished and influential psychologists of all time.
Behavior seen as sex-appropriate in children, such as independence (in boys) or empathy (in girls), is often positively reinforced by adults’ expectations, as well as by children’s imitation of adults and peers.
ALBERT BANDURA
Albert Bandura was born to Polish parents in the small town of Mundare in Alberta, Canada. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, moving on to take his master’s degree and doctorate at the University of Iowa, where his interest in learning theory developed. In 1953, he took up a teaching post at Stanford University, California, where he is a professor emeritus.
One of the world’s most eminent and influencial psychologists, Bandura has received numerous awards, including the Thorndike Award for Distinguished Contributions of Psychology to Education (1999), and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy (2001). He also has more than 16 honorary degrees, and in 1974 was elected president of the American Psychological Association.
Key works
1973 Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis
1977 Social Learning Theory
1986 Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory
See also: Konrad Lorenz • B.F. Skinner • Sigmund Freud • Lev Vygotsky
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Moral development
BEFORE
1923 Sigmund Freud offers a psychoanalytic account of moral development.
1932 Jean Piaget argues that morality develops from two types of reasoning: one that is subject to the rules of others, and another that is subject only to a person’s own rules.
AFTER
1977 American educational psychologist William Damon suggests that young children are able to take the needs of others into account, earlier than Kohlberg claims they are.
1982 American psychologist Nancy Eisenberg argues that in order to understand children’s moral development, we must examine their reasoning when faced with conflict between their own needs and those of others.
Lawrence Kohlberg believed that morality develops gradually throughout childhood and adolescence. In 1956, he began a study involving 72 boys between the ages of 10 and 16. He presented the boys with moral dilemmas that required them to choose between two alternatives, neither of which could be considered completely acceptable, and noted their responses. One example was whether it was right or wrong for a man with no money to steal drugs that his sick wife desperately needed. Kohlberg followed up on 58 of the boys, testing them every three years over the course of 20 years, to observe how their moral inclinations changed with age. Based on the answers given by his subjects, Kohlberg identified six stages of moral development, which spanned three levels of moral reasoning: preconventional, conventional, and postconventional.
"Moral thought may be considered partially to generate its own data as it goes along."
Lawrence Kohlberg
Building moral reasoning
The preconventional level of moral reasoning, which develops during our first nine years of life, considers rules as fixed and absolute. In the first of its two stages (the stage of obedience and punishment), we determine whether actions are right or wrong by whether or not they lead to a punishment. In the second stage (the stage of individualism and exchange), right and wrong are determined by what brings rewards. The desires and needs of others are important, but only in a reciprocal sense—“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Morality at this level is governed by consequence.
The second level of moral reasoning starts in adolescence, and continues into early adulthood. It sees us starting to consider the intention behind behavior, rather than just the consequences. Its first stage, often called the “good boy—nice girl” stage, is when we begin classifying moral behavior as to whether it will help or please. Being seen as good becomes the goal. In the second stage (the law and order stage), we start to equate “being good” with respecting authority and obeying the law, believing that this protects and sustains society.
The third level of moral development is when we move beyond simple conformity, but Kohlberg suggested that only around 10–15 percent of us ever reach this level. In its first stage (the social contract and individual rights stage), we still respect authority, but there is a growing recognition that individual rights can supersede laws that are destructive or restrictive. We come to realize that human life is more sacred than just following rules. The sixth and final stage (the stage of universal ethical principles) is when our own conscience becomes the ultimate judge, and we commit ourselves to equal rights and respect for all. We may even resort to civil disobedience in the name of universal principles, such as justice.
Kohlberg’s six-stage theory was considered radical, because it stated that morality is not imposed on children (as psychoanalysts said), nor is it about avoiding bad feelings (as the behaviorists had thought). Kohlberg believed children developed a moral code and awareness of respect, empathy, and love through interaction with others.
Mahatma Gandhi was among the few who reach the final stages of moral development described by Kohlberg. Throughout his adult life, he felt a duty to disregard unjust and oppresive laws.
LAWRENCE KOHLBERG
The youngest of four children, Lawrence Kohlberg was born in Bronxville, New York. After completing high school at the end of World War II, he became a sailor, and helped smuggle Jewish refugees into Palestine.
In 1948, Kohlberg enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in just one year, and went on to research and teach, gaining a doctorate in 1958
. He also taught at Yale University, and finally Harvard.
While in Belize in 1971, Kohlberg contracted a parasitic infection that left him battling with persistent pain and depression. On January 19, 1987, after asking to leave a treatment session, he committed suicide, reportedly by walking into the icy waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
Key works
1969 Stage and Sequence
1976 Moral Stages and Moralization
1981 The Philosophy of Moral Development
See also: Sigmund Freud • Jean Piaget • Albert Bandura
IN CONTEXT
APPROACH
Nativism
BEFORE
1958 B.F. Skinner uses operant conditioning to explain language development, arguing that children learn words and phrases through reinforcement.
1977 Albert Bandura argues that children may imitate the general form of sentences, and fill in these with specific words.
AFTER
1994 Steven Pinker argues that language is an instinct from an innate programme hard-wired in the brain, which arose because it was adaptive for human survival.
2003 Psychologists Stan Kuczaj and Heather Hill claim parents offer children better examples of grammatical sentences than Chomsky suggests.
In the middle of the 20th century, learning theory as explained by B.F. Skinner and Albert Bandura dominated psychologists’ conception of language development. These behaviorists believed that language—like all other human faculties—was a direct result of environmental input and learning, developed through the reinforcement and reward techniques at the heart of operant conditioning. Skinner noted that when children imitate verbal sounds, and form correct words, they receive immediate reinforcement and approval from their parents, which motivates them to continue learning new words and phrases. Bandura broadened the concept of imitation, noting that children imitated not only specific words and sounds, but also the general form and structure of sentences, as though filling in templates with specific words.
Linguist Noam Chomsky, however, did not believe that operant conditioning adequately explained the productivity, creativity, and innovation of language. It also seemed insufficient to explain children’s spontaneous use of grammatical rules that they have neither heard nor learned, as well as their ability to understand the meaning of an entire sentence without necessarily understanding the meaning of each word. For Chomsky, this ability is innate in humans—he claimed that “the language organ grows like any other body organ,” likening it to other features acquired through heredity.
Nativism
Chomsky maintained that, although a child’s environment supplies the content of language, grammar itself is an in-built and biologically determined human capacity. To illustrate his point, he refers to other aspects of human development that we accept as being an inevitable outcome of heredity. The onset of puberty, for instance, is an aspect of human growth that is like the “growth” of the language organ. We assume unquestioningly that it is a genetically determined milestone, and though the specific details of its onset depend on several variable environmental influences, the fundamental process is the same across the human species. We take for granted that this is a result of basic biological programming. Language growth, Chomsky emphasizes, is another genetically programmed inevitability of human development, on a par with the processes that determine that we have arms instead of wings, or that build the structure of our visual or circulatory systems.
The concept that language is a part of our growth process is important because it highlights Chomsky’s belief that it is not a consequence of learning. He adopts a nativist perspective, focusing on the inherited contributions to behavior and minimizing the importance of environmental input. However, he believes that the environment plays a role in determining the specific direction of language growth, insofar as an individual’s language organ develops according to early experiences. For instance, because Chomsky grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he absorbed knowledge of that particular English dialect and his language organ’s structure was tailored accordingly. The same process occurs for everyone, whether they have grown up in Paris, Tokyo, or London.
"Language is a process of free creation."
Noam Chomsky
Universal grammar
But where is the proof that language acquisition is inborn rather than learned? According to Chomsky, the most convincing evidence for this claim is that there are aspects of grammar that are so intuitive and self-evident that they need never be discussed or learned in order to be understood (they are therefore part of our biological inheritance). For instance, there are certain constructions in the English language that permit the dropping of pronouns, and others that do not. The difference between the two is subtle, yet even by the age of six, native English-speaking children will use the constructions flawlessly. This implies that certain aspects of grammar are understood without requiring any instruction, and that the knowledge is therefore innate. This is the only way to explain how people have such a rich grammatical understanding and how children can use language so creatively by the age of six.
Chomsky claims that “universal grammar” is found worldwide, with modifications according to people’s native languages. It is a predefined mechanism that acts as the basis for the acquisition of any language. He argues that this is demonstrated by the way that all children are equally able to learn any language to which they are exposed. He says that a common set of linguistic features is built into the language organ through heredity, and it includes elements of grammar, meaning, and speech. It is what makes it possible for us to speak and learn human languages, and may make it impossible for us to learn any language that violates these principles.
"We are designed to learn languages based upon a common set of principles, which we may call universal grammar."
Noam Chomsky
Language device
Chomsky proposes a name for our innate language organ: the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). He bases his claim for its existence on three things: the fact that children are born with the capacity to formulate and understand all kinds of sentences despite never having heard or learned them; that every human language appears to have certain universal elements; and that some grammatical principles are acquired by individuals regardless of their culture or intelligence. There is other supporting evidence as well, including the fact that the human vocal organs, breathing apparatus, auditory system, and brain are all specialized for spoken communication. Chomsky argues that, in light of the frequency with which children are exposed to the ungrammatical and incomplete speech uttered by their parents and other adults, only some kind of LAD can explain the fact that children seem to possess knowledge of grammatical rules. Finally, studies of deaf children provide further evidence for an LAD, revealing the untutored emergence of a “gestural language” that shares the basic principles of spoken language.
Deaf children communicate using a “gestural language,” which has the same characteristics as spoken language, suggesting that knowledge of grammar and syntax is innate.
Evaluation
Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker agrees that language is an instinct stemming from an innate program that is hard-wired in the human brain, but says that it arose through evolution and was therefore adaptive, helping our ancestors to survive. Chomsky disagrees with Pinker about how language evolved, arguing that language represents a distinct mental module that is unique to human beings and completely independent of general cognitive ability.
Linguist Jean Aitchison is also in agreement with Chomsky’s claim that
children are hard-wired with knowledge of linguistic rules, but her view is that children have built-in problem-solving abilities that enable them to process linguistic data (and other forms of data). Chomsky maintains, however, that human beings’ innate language ability exists independently of other abilities, and because the mind is constructed of mental organs similar to those of the body, language can easily be isolated from other mental faculties.
Criticism also comes from Robin Chapman, an expert in communicative disorders, who argues that the study of language development should also be understood within the context of children’s social interactions. She notes that language structure is acquired piecemeal over several years, and that there are wide variations in how rapidly children acquire it, suggesting that social environment could also be a factor. There is also some degree of doubt surrounding Chomsky’s assumption that language is unique to human beings. Data from studies with chimpanzees and gorillas has suggested that the difference between ape and human language is quantitative rather than qualitative, which raises questions about how species-specific language really is.
Chomsky’s work has been highly influential across linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and even mathematics. Although the idea that children are predisposed to learn language is widely accepted, his claim that children have an innate knowledge of language that is not deeply influenced by their parents is highly controversial. He has been widely considered the most extreme nativist in the history of psychology, and although a biological source for language development is widely thought to be nearer the truth than one involving operant conditioning, it is still unlikely to offer the complete picture. Chomsky’s work has led to the emergence of more integrated views, which will no doubt lead to new research and understanding.