Morality refers to “the ability to distinguish right from wrong, to act on this distinction and to experience pride when we do the right things and guilt or shame when we do not.” Both Piaget and Kohlberg made significant contributions to this area of study. Experts in developmental psychology have categorized morality into three key facets: the emotional aspect, the cognitive aspect, and the action-oriented aspect.
The emotional aspect encapsulates the feelings accompanying decisions that may be considered morally right or wrong, like guilt or empathy. The cognitive aspect delves into the mental mechanisms people employ to judge whether actions are morally acceptable or not. For instance, a child aged eight might be told by a trusted adult not to eat cookies from a jar, yet the temptation to disobey may arise when they're alone. However, this urge is weighed against their understanding that they could face repercussions for doing so. The action-oriented aspect concerns how individuals conduct themselves in situations tempting dishonesty or when they are presented with the opportunity to aid someone in need.
Moral affect
Moral affect is “emotion related to matters of right and wrong”. Such emotion includes shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride; shame is correlated with the disapproval by one's peers, guilt is correlated with the disapproval of oneself, embarrassment is feeling disgraced while in the public eye, and pride is a feeling generally brought about by a positive opinion of oneself when admired by one's peers
Empathy is also tied in with moral affect and is an emotional unfolding that allows you to be able to understand how another person feels. If an empathetic person sees someone crying, then they may understand their sadness. If the empathetic person sees someone that has just accomplished a lifelong goal, they may understand their happiness. Empathy falls under the affective component of morality and is the main reasoning behind selflessness. According to theorist Martin Hoffman, empathy plays a key role in the progression of morality. Empathy causes people to be more prominent in prosocial behavior as discussed earlier. Without empathy, there would be no humanity.
Moral reasoning
Moral reasoning is the thinking process involved in deciding whether an act is right or wrong. This allows the development of social cognition, which is required for experiencing other people's distress. These skills also enable the construction of a concept of reciprocity and fairness, allowing people to go beyond mere egocentrism. According to Piaget and Kohlberg, moral reasoning progresses through a constant sequence, a fixed and universal order of stages, each of which contains a consistent way of thinking about moral issues that are all distinct from one another.
Jean Piaget's view
Jean Piaget was the first psychologist to suggest a theory of moral development. According to Piaget, development only emerges with action, and a person constructs and reconstructs his knowledge of the world as the result of new interactions with his environment. Piaget said that people pass through three different stages of moral reasoning: premoral period, heteronomous morality, and autonomous morality.
During the premoral stage (occurring during the preschool years), children show very little awareness or understanding of rules and cannot be considered moral beings. The heteronomous stage (occurring between the ages of 6 and 10) is defined as "under the rule of another": during this stage, the child takes rules more seriously, believing that they are handed down by authority figures and are sacred and never to be altered; regardless of whether the intentions were good or bad, any violator to these passed-down rules will be judged as wrongdoing. In the last stage, autonomous morality (occurring between the ages of 10 and 11), children begin to appreciate that rules are agreements between individuals.
Lawrence Kohlberg's view
Influenced by Piaget's work, Kohlberg created an influential cognitive development theory of moral development. Like Piaget, Kohlberg formulated that moral growth occurs in a very universal and consistent sequence of three moral levels, but for him the stages in the sequence are connected with one another, and grows out of the preceding stage. Kohlberg's view represents a more complex way of thinking about moral issues.