Conduct and Conscience. The Socialization of Internalized Control Over Behavior

403 Pages·1968·7.138 MB·English

by  Justin Aronfreed (Auth.)

CONDUCT AND CONSCIENCE
THE SOCIALIZATION
OF INTERNALIZED CONTROL
OVER BEHAVIOR
JUSTIN ARONFREED
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
1968
ACADEMIC PRESS New York London
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PREFACE
This monograph began as a manuscript that was commissioned, with
far more modest intentions, by the Social Science Research Council. A
much shorter version was first presented at a conference which was
sponsored by the committee that the Council had established for the
purpose of advancing research and theory in the area of socialization. The
members of that committee were: John Clausen (Chairman), Orville G.
Brim, Alex Inkeles, Ronald Lippitt, Eleanor E. Maccoby, and M. Brew
ster Smith. I am indebted to these people for their having provided the
original social stimulus for the germination of the monograph, and to
many other participants at the original conference for their generous re
actions to its initial form. Martin L. Hoffman was the organizer of the
conference, and was also a patient source of encouragement while the
manuscript was growing toward its final shape. I owe a special debt of
gratitude to M. Brewster Smith for his intelligent and sympathetic reading
of an intermediate version of the manuscript.
In the beginning, the manuscript confined itself to the description of a
few experiments which were addressed to an account of the mechanisms
of translation between the child's social experience and its internalized
control of behavior. There were also some brief excursions into the theo
retical implications of the experiments. As time went on, the manuscript
underwent two metamorphoses which began to seem preordained. The first
transformation grew out of my perception that it was difficult to con
ceptualize the mechanisms of internalization without a more general treat
ment of socialization. The second and final transformation was an escala
tion of the phenomena of socialization into a theoretical conception of the
learning process. As the monograph now stands, the first two chapters
present a synopsis of the major problems which are to be engaged in any
attempt to understand the origins of conduct and conscience. The third
chapter redefines these problems in the context of a concept of internali
zation. The fourth chapter is the theoretical core of the monograph. It sets
forth an initial conception of the mechanisms of learning which underlie
v
VI PREFACE
socialization. The remaining eight chapters, while they contain a certain
amount of additional theoretical material, are primarily descriptive and
experimental analyses of specific internalized products of socialization,
from the perspective of the fourth chapter.
It gives me a great deal of pleasure to acknowledge the contribution that
has been made to my thinking about the nature of socialization by many
interesting conversations with a number of near and distant colleagues. I
must also offer my apologies to some of these people if it was not always
apparent to them that our conversations were being digested into this
monograph. Since my fondness for such conversations exceeds the capacity
of my memory, I cannot thank as many people as I would like. But I can
single out the following individuals: Albert Bandura, Urie Bronfenbrenner,
Francis W. Irwin, Lawrence Kohlberg, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Daniel R.
Miller, Walter Mischel, Harris Savin, Robert R. Sears, Richard L. Solo
mon, the late Richard H. Walters, John W. M. Whiting, and David R.
Williams.
The National Institutes of Health provided support for most of the
empirical work that appears here. The National Science Foundation pro
vided a senior postdoctoral award for a year's retreat as a Fellow of the
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In the hospitable
intellectual climate of the Center, I was able to confront the requirements
of a theory of socialization at close range.
I am very grateful to Isabelle Friedman for her superb assistance in the
preparation of the manuscript.
Finally, I acknowledge an irredeemable debt to my wife and children,
from whom I have taken much instruction concerning the problems of
socialization.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania JUSTIN ARONFREED
June, 1968
CHAPTER ONE
CONSCIENCE
AND
MORAL JUDGEMENT
Conscience is the term that has been used traditionally to refer to the
cognitive and affective processes which constitute an internalized moral
governor over an individual's conduct.1 In the classical Greek conceptions
of morality (Plato, The Republic; Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics), there
was nothing that would really correspond to what we today might call con
science. The Greeks thought of moral judgement as an essentially rational
phenomenon. And they did not perceive it in the powerful affective compo
nents which we are now inclined to regard as indispensable to internalized
control over social conduct. Some later writers also have emphasized the
place of intellect in moral judgement—particularly Bentham, J. S. Mill,
and the modern British ethical intuitionists (for example, G. E. Moore, in
Principia Etìlica, 1903). But the more striking historical trend has been
toward increasing emphasis on the affective, inarticulate, and impelling fea
tures of conscience. As early as the writings of Augustine, we begin to find
the concept of an internal agency of control and sanction that commends,
warns, and chastises in terms which refer to strong affective states. Many
other moral philosophers have been careful to distinguish between the
functions of cognition and affect in the control of conduct. Philosophers
who have taken very different approaches to a conception of moral
judgement—Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard—have in
common their distinction between the understanding and the will, or be
tween thought and the motivation to act. Interest in the affective compo
nents of moral judgement is also apparent among more contemporary ethi
cal theorists (Ayer, 1935; Perry, 1926; Stevenson, 1944), who have given
much attention to the affective core that morality has in common with
other kinds of value systems.
The emergence of the behavioral and social sciences provided a natural
istic view of conscience which gave even more attention to its affective and
motivational properties. The use of "natural philosophy" also fostered an
expanded conception of the dimensions of value which were to be included
within conscience. Moral philosophy generally had taken the view that
morality was concerned only with fundamental human relationships. Val
ues were considered to be moral when they were addressed to desires and
constraints which had direct implications for the welfare of others. Moral
1 A distinction is sometimes made between moral and ethical thought, when ethics
is used to refer to the theoretical foundations of a moral point of view. The distinc
tion is not required here.
2
CONSCIENCE AND MORAL JUDGEMENT 3
values were described with a language that conveyed attachment and obli
gation to other human beings. They were analyzed with respect to concepts
of freedom, responsibility, authority, and the distribution and possession of
material goods. An analysis of moral value yielded a set of principles of
conduct which could be tested against their beneficial or harmful conse
quences for the participants in a social relationship and for society as a
whole. Moral cognition had much to do, then, with the evaluation of the
goodness or Tightness of actions by reference to their impact on others.
From the point of view of traditional moral philosophy, contemporary
naturalistic conceptions of conscience often subsume a much broader array
of value systems than might properly be called moral. In some of these
value systems, the consequences of an act for others are relatively insignifi
cant as determinants of the act's evaluation. It is quite common today to
find that the term conscience is used in a sense that embraces dimensions
of value which pertain to cleanliness, to sexual habits, to proficiency and
persistence in achievement, and to a great many other highly individualized
and personal segments of human behavior.
At least four distinct sources of influence can be discerned in tracing the
broadening of the concept of conscience. One source can be found in the
cultural relativism which social anthropologists introduced into the inter
pretation of their field studies. Following the early work of Boas and of
Malinowski, there has been a continuous tradition of attention to cross-
cultural variations among societies in the substance of their dominant val
ues. More recently, there has been much interest in the predictability of
different value systems from child-rearing practices and from the forms of
primary social institutions. A second source of influence can be traced to
social-psychological theories of development which emphasized the child's
ability to adopt the roles and normative structures of its socializing agents.
This source was first clearly visible in the developmental theories of Bald
win (1906), McDougall (1908), and Mead (1934). Its more persistent
form is in concepts which treat conscience as the internalized representa
tion of either the normative standards or the role-relationships to which the
child has been exposed as a result of interactions with its socializing agents
(Newcomb, 1950; Parsons and Bales et al, 1955). These conceptions
would describe moral standards of conduct in much the same way that they
would describe the standards which are appropriate to sex role, to achieve
ment, or to social conformity in general.
The psychoanalytic concept of the superego was a third source of the
dilution of the moral connotations of conscience. From his observation of
4 CHAPTER ONE
the behavior of adults, Freud (1927, 1936, Chapter 8) drew the inference
that children acquired many forms of control over their behavior which did
not require conscious volition, even though they had become independent
of external reward or punishment. He took the view that the superego em
braced a variety of internalized controls, some of which operated in a
mechanical manner without the mediation of articulate standards of judge
ment. These irrational forms of behavioral control often were described as
though they were more involuntary than they were evaluative. They were
attributed to the limited verbal and cognitive capacities of the young child,
and also to the repression of early experiences which had been associated
with intense anxiety. Even in those areas of conduct where a person's ac
tions were thought to be governed by explicit standards which were avail
able to consciousness and verbalization, it was presumed that such stan
dards took into account more than simply the person's intentions and the
consequences of his actions for others. The directness of expression of a
drive, the choice of object of the drive, and other aspects of motivated be
havior, were all linked to the operation of conscience. And the mechanism
that Freud suggested for the formation of the superego was an identifica
tion with a parental figure that went far beyond an adoption of the parent's
moral viewpoint.
A final source of an expanded conception of conscience lies in behavior-
istic theories of social learning. The earliest forms of such theories were
based primarily on studies of animals (Holt, 1931; Miller and Dollard,
1941; Thorndike, 1911). These theories tried to explain how the behavior
of one organism could be patterned after the behavior of another through
external rewards and punishments. They were not addressed to the prob
lem of how social behavior became independent of direct external rein
forcement. More recent extensions of these theories have attempted to ac
count for internalized control of behavior by setting forth learning mecha
nisms which are not entirely dependent on external reinforcement of the
child's observable actions (Aronfreed, 1964; Mowrer, 1960b, Chapter 3;
Sears, Maccoby, and Levin, 1957, Chapter 10; Whiting and Child, 1953,
Chapter 11). The mechanisms generally attempt to specify how the adop
tion of the evaluative responses of socializing agents might become intrin
sically reinforcing to a child. However, the cognitive dimensions of evalua
tive responses are not examined in any detail. The emphasis is rather on
their generalized function in the mediation of affective states and overt be
havior. Accordingly, from the point of view of social learning theories,
conscience is composed of value systems which mediate conduct in many
CONSCIENCE AND MORAL JUDGEMENT 5
areas of social behavior. Dimensions of value which are specifically moral
are not given any particular functional significance.
There are numerous illustrations of how the term conscience is now used
in ways which would seem to extend its application well beyond the tradi
tional perimeter of moral judgement. It is used, for example, to refer to
value orientations which support self-denial of pleasure, effort in the face
of adversity, and other self-directive patterns of behavior, many of which
are well captured in concepts such as "Protestant ethic" (Weber, 1930) or
"inner-direction" (Riesman, Denney, and Glazer, 1950). Surveys which
aim to uncover the child-rearing antecedents of conscience examine not
only the socialization of such behavioral domains as aggression—which
would easily lend itself to moral evaluation—but also the socialization of
the child's dependence on the mother, of its toilet habits, and of its manipu
lative and exploratory dispositions. It is interesting to note that some recent
general treatments of value (Hare, 1952; Pepper, 1958) have reacted
against an overemphasis on the common psychological foundations of
different kinds of value, and have tried to demonstrate the utility of distin
guishing between moral and nonmoral systems of value. Of course, there
are unavoidable semantic problems of definition in the question of what
constitutes moral judgement. Nevertheless, it may prove useful to recognize
that moral judgement is only one sector of the multiple value systems
which are now commonly regarded as the substance of conscience.
Even the broadest definition of the standards of value to be included
within conscience must be constrained by certain criterial boundaries. It
seems clear that many kinds of standards—for example, those which are
applicable to taste or to physical skill—do not belong under the rubric of
conscience, even though they may be derived from social experience. If we
wanted to describe conscience fairly liberally, we might say that it sub
sumes those evaluative standards which apply to what we ordinarily call
conduct. But conduct itself designates a vast set of behavioral dispositions
which have been molded by the child's intercourse with a social environ
ment. We will see that much of conduct can be internally governed without
the evaluative support of conscience. And even within the great body of
evaluative cognition which children do acquire during the socialization of
their conduct, the intensity of affectivity will vary as a function of the na
ture of the social experience through which specific values have been trans
mitted. The behavior of parents and of other agents of the social transmis
sion of values will establish different intensities of value for the child in
different areas of conduct. The usual connotations of conscience might
6 CHAPTER ONE
therefore be conveyed more accurately if we were to narrow its definition
even further by a criterion of affective intensity. We might restrict the prov
ince of conscience to those areas of conduct where social experience has
attached substantial affective value to the child's cognitive representation
and evaluation of its own behavior.