Motivation and Moral Development as Determinants of Behavioral Acquiescence and Moral Action

Conceptualizing Strategic Ethical Decision Making: Cultural Traits as Moderator

“…It is said that moral consideration is a good approach to good decision making. In the context of Ward and Wilson (1980), they highlighted that good decision can be made when an individual is motivationally orientated. This way the individual does not get influenced by any pressure from external parties in making decisions.…”

Motives, Values and Moral Judgments

“…These particular dimensions of personality were selected for study because in recent years they have been of major theoretical interest to researchers in the field of social, personality and developmental psychology (e.g., MCClelland, 1981;Kohlberg, Note 1;Rokeach, 1973). Further, there is a growing empirical literature which has shown that these dimensions of personality influence a wide range of social behaviors which include prosocial behavior (e.g., Staub, 1978;Wilson, 1976;Wilson & Petruska, 1982); person perception (Assor, Aronoff, & Messe, in press); leadership activity (e.g., McClelland, 1979;Messe, Aronoff & Wilson, 1972); small group performance (e.g., Wilson, Aronoff, & Messe, 1975) and moral aotion (e.g., Ward & Wilson, 1980). Therefore, the specific purpose of this study is to investigate the-degree to which motives are associated with two cognitive dimensions of personality, morarjudgment ability and value-orientation.…”

“…Briefly, however, self-esteem scores on the SCT are significantly correlated with the CPI class I scales of interpersonal adequacy; POI measures of inner-directedness; higher stages of moral judgment; internality; lGPF measures of cyclothymia, surgency, ego-strength and dominance; n Achievement as assessed by the TAT; self-esteem as measured by the Rosenberg scale and the Tennessee Self-concept scales. On the other hand, safety scores on the SCT are significantly correlated with anxiety and dependency as meadured by the manifest anxiety and dependency sub-scales of the MMPI: externality; dogmatism and authori-' tarianism; low self-esteem and low feelings of anterpersonal adequacy (e.g., Aronoff & Wilson, 1972;Assor, Aronoff, & Messe, in press;Haymes & Green, in press;Ward & Wilson, 1980;Wilson, 1976;Wilson & Aronoff, 1973;Wilson & Petruska, 1952;Wilson & Wilson, 1977).…”

“…Theoretically, this implies the interesting possibility that motives, values and traits can be linked t~gether in unique ways that form distinct typologies of personality (Maddi, 1980). In a recent study, Ward and Wilson (1980) found, for example, that it was possible to identify persons who were esteem-or safety-oriented at each of Kohlberg's six stages of moral development and to make accurate predictions of their behavior from knowledge of how the motive and schema variables interacted in influencing moral action in a mock jury experiment. In the present study hypotheses 2,3 and 4 tested the idea that it is possible to predict which schema and motive variables are likely to be associated with each other.…”

The Cognitive versus Psychodynamic Debate about Morality

“…Yet while critics of Kohlberg take him to task for not offering any a priori justification for distinguishing between form and content, and for himself undermining the distinction in certain instances [Conn, 1981;Locke, 1983], neither the validity of the con tent versus structure distinction nor the claims for the logical structure of the stages is ever seriously questioned. What has been the major focus of attack for the critics of cognitive-developmental theory is its preoccupation with the structure of moral reasoning, to the exclusion of the content of moral judgments [Conn, 1981;Locke, 1983], motivation [Jurkovic, 1980;Percival, 1979], and moral behavior [Conn, 1981;Locke, 1983;Hoffman, 1979], It is objected, for example, that moral reasoning can be of no great psychological or other interest if it has no close links with the way a person actually behaves [Aronfreed, 1971;Blast, 1980;Locke, 1983;Gerson and Da mon, 1978;Ward and Wilson, 1980]. This unsettling possibility receives some founda tion from reviews of the empirical literature which highlight the complex nature of the relationship between moral thought and mo ral action [Jurkovic, 1980;Kupfersmid and Wonderly, 1980].…”