Educational Psychology Case Study: Cognitive and Moral Development

Introduction: Steven's Developmental Profile

The subject of this case study is an 18-year-old male who, for the purposes of this project, will be referred to as "Steven." Steven illustrated high intelligence and precocious cognitive development as an infant and as a small child. In those respects, Steven reached several specific milestones of cognitive development before his peers and performed very well on educational measures generally associated with intelligence throughout elementary and middle school. However, as Steven entered adolescence, he became easily bored and distracted in school, and his academic performance dropped significantly. Steven also found himself in trouble for disciplinary violations on many occasions.

In many respects, at least with the benefit of hindsight, there were indications of problems in Steven's perception of moral rules and values even before adolescence. Those problems became much worse in adolescence and eventually resulted in his being confined to a school for troubled boys at the age of 17, following repeated disciplinary problems both at school and at home. Steven began talking earlier than his peers and also demonstrated other elements of high intelligence and cognitive development in relation to perceiving various physical relationships and associations. Steven also absorbed rules and logical principles early.

However, Steven always seemed — in retrospect — to lack the ability to appreciate some of the fundamental principles and concepts served by rules. That was particularly evident in the distinctions he made in connection with telling the truth, making promises, and negotiating fair solutions to problems. From a very early age, Steven spoke very definitively about honesty and could articulate the meaning and importance of being "honest." On the other hand, he seemed to lack the same ability — or interest — in honesty in the spirit of a rule that he had always easily recognized in terms of honesty in the proverbial letter of rules and promises.

Early Signs of Moral Reasoning Deficits

Steven's difficulties were not confined to adolescence. As a child, Steven used to trick his peers about the relative quantity of ice cream or candy in packages in order to maneuver them into unfair, though technically voluntary, trades. There were also more subtle apparent connections between Steven's relative inability — especially striking given his intelligence in other areas — to recognize moral issues, provided they did not involve lying outright, physically overpowering others, or overtly stealing. This pattern suggests that Steven's moral reasoning developed along a narrow and highly literal track, one that recognized rule violations only in their most explicit and concrete forms.

As an adolescent, Steven became very skilled at using his superior communication skills and persuasiveness to split hairs and exploit contrived ambiguities in agreements, allowing him to get what he wanted without "breaking" a rule or a promise in the strictest technical sense. This behavior is consistent with a failure to progress beyond early stages of moral development, in which rules are understood as fixed, external constraints rather than as expressions of underlying social values such as fairness and reciprocity.

Illustrative Incidents: Rules in Letter vs. Spirit

Two specific examples illustrate Steven's pattern most clearly. The first concerned a trade involving his bike and a skateboard he had been specifically forbidden to purchase with his allowance. When Steven was 14, he had expressed the desire to purchase an expensive custom-made skateboard. His parents forbade him from "spending your money on a skateboard," primarily because they considered it too dangerous and also because they disapproved of the particular friends with whom he intended to use it. His parents agreed to allow Steven to "buy yourself a bike instead." Steven purchased a bike and immediately traded it for a skateboard. When his father confiscated the skateboard, Steven became furious because, according to him, he "didn't buy a skateboard — I bought a bike and traded for the skateboard."

The second incident occurred when Steven was 12 and his younger brother was 5. Steven allowed his brother to watch cartoons on television instead of a science fiction program that Steven preferred, in return for the brother's agreement that "I get to watch whatever I want for one year." Steven showed no appreciation for the unfairness of tricking a 5-year-old who had not yet reached the stage of cognitive development where he could meaningfully understand what he was agreeing to. When his parents stepped in and reversed the agreement after discovering what had happened, Steven accused them of "not being fair" and of "caring more about him," referring to his younger brother.

In Steven's mind, his parents had prohibited him from buying a custom skateboard; they had said he could use his allowance to buy a bike, and they had never explicitly said anything about not being allowed to trade his new bike for the skateboard. Steven expressed the belief that "people should keep their agreements" and "it's not my fault if people are too stupid to know what they're saying." This rigid, self-serving interpretation of fairness and honesty is a defining feature of his case.

Application of Piaget's Conceptual Framework

Steven began demonstrating signs of precocious cognitive development during the concrete operational stage (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008) when he began to acquire and apply conservation of numbers at the age of 4½, conservation of mass at 5, and conservation of weight shortly before his 6th birthday. In retrospect, it was apparently relevant that Steven's parents had noticed a tendency on his part to use his advanced cognitive skills to take advantage of his peers without regard for fairness.

There were also more subtle apparent connections between Steven's relative inability — especially in light of his intelligence in other areas — to recognize moral issues, provided they did not involve lying, physically overpowering others, or overtly stealing. As a child, Steven tricked his peers into unfair trades by misrepresenting the relative quantities of ice cream or candy in packages. As an adolescent, he refined this approach into a sophisticated exploitation of contractual ambiguity.

Relevant historical information provided by Steven's parents included the fact that Steven was initially applauded for demonstrating superior awareness and understanding of his surroundings and the relationships between objects and people. In retrospect, some of the positive feedback Steven received during the early phases of his concrete operational stage was connected to incidents in which he outwitted his playmates. During this same period, Steven's parents were much more careful to correct physically inappropriate impulses and consistently stressed the importance of "telling the truth." It may be that Steven's relative inability to appreciate moral issues — and his overemphasis of literal truth over fairness — had nothing to do with his precociousness in other domains.

Alternatively, it could be that the two anomalies are directly related on a neurological or other level (Dennett, 1991). Finally, it could also be that Steven's precociousness simply gave him early opportunities to display his intelligence, and that reinforcement through parental praise — in conjunction with explicit instructions about not lying — established a reward loop in a 5-year-old that would not have occurred without those opportunities (Pinker, 2002).

Conclusion: Critiquing Piaget's Stage Model

In some respects, the case of Steven may represent some of the conceptual criticisms of Piaget's theoretical approach to understanding human cognitive development and the formation of moral understanding almost exclusively in definitive stages. Cases such as Steven's may illustrate that Piaget's concept of concrete stages of cognitive development are too rigidly defined (Gardner, 2006). While certain aspects of cognitive intelligence seem to correspond to chronological stages, they also appear to be highly influenced by learning through experiences with the external world. Explicit messages about behavioral expectations are also important (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2008). Likewise, it is not necessarily the case that all adolescents — or adults — ever reach the complex reasoning stages of logical or moral development described by Piaget (Gardner, 2006).

In Steven's case, it may be that the increased exposure to reinforcement for demonstrations of intelligence occurred at a time when Steven understood only literal connections, despite being precociously verbal. It is possible that this early reinforcement of his displays of intelligence, together with instructions from his parents and other adults not to lie, established a neural pathway that interfered with the normal development of moral reasoning commensurate with his general intelligence.

References

Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. New York: Little Brown & Co.

Gardner, H. (2006). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books.

Gerrig, R., & Zimbardo, P. (2008). Psychology and Life (17th ed.). New York: Allyn & Bacon.

Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Penguin.