Are The Competent Morally Good?

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Name: David Fletcher Class: Introduction to Psychology Day: Mon/Wed 12:30 – 3:20 Instructor: Ammeter, Tammy L Assignment: Emotion and Motivation Research Article Due Date: Wednesday, July 13, 2011 Emotion and Motivation Are the Competent Morally Good? Perspective Taking and Moral Motivation of Children Involve in Bullying Key Terms: Bully: someone uses coercion or inflicts abuse to affect others habitually creating an imbalance of power. Victim: a person who is deceived, cheated or injured by force Bully-Victim: one who displays both characteristics of the bully and the victim Pro-social behavior: behaviors carried out with the intentions to help others Perspective taking: understanding…show more content…
Perspective Taking and Moral Motivation of Children Involved In Bullying.’ They tested a hypothesis to see if bullies although socially competent are they lacking in perspective taking moral motivation? They wondered if it would explain the exploitation of social skills for manipulative and anti-social goals. To be even more precise they hypothesized to see if bullies displayed more advanced perspective taking skills than bully-victims. The hypothesis included children from different bullying perspectives including bullies, bully-victims, victims and children exhibiting pro-social behavior. In doing so, they could accurately measure the data creating specific results when comparing each group in moral intentions. The authors expected to see the bullies having greater deficits in moral competencies limited to motivation rather than knowledge component of morality. The bully-victims were expected to be in general ineffective in understanding of their social situations/ perspective taking skills and moral…show more content…
Group 1- bullies, group 2- bully-victims, group 3- victims, and group 4- pro-social children. Reliable measures used to identify these groups were done by peer reports and teachers ratings. Both teachers and peer reports used due process when measuring each child’s propensity for the group they were nominated for. The ‘peer reports’ method consisted of explaining samples of behaviors for each group of children then conducting one on one interviews with them asking specific questions related to their opinions of who would fall into each group of bullying and why. The ‘teachers reports’ method consisted of a questionnaire with a four point and five point scale to rate behaviors demonstrated by the children in the sample group. The data from each method was combined and out of the 624 children screened for this experiment, a group of 212 were selected to participate. They children were divided into sub-groups as follows: 50 in the pro-social group, 33 in the victims group, 80 in the bully-victims group and 49 in the bully group. There were more boys represented in the aggressive groups and girls in the victim and pro-social groups. The groups were interviewed by graduate students and were asked to perform tasks related to cognitive and affective perspective taking and on moral rule transgressions. The tasks also included a way to assess moral knowledge and moral

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