Abstract
The objective of this study is to explore and to verify the utility of the five moral foundations (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity) to differentiate between two understudied groups, namely, young offenders who use violence against their parents or dating partners, as well as to predict the extent to which these young people justify violence and perceive themselves as aggressive. Although both types of violence imply, by definition, harming someone (low care) and adopting a position of authority (high authority), we hypothesize a very different role for at least these two moral foundations. Our results support this idea and show a much lower regard for the five moral foundations, including care and authority, in the child-to-parent violence group (CPV; N = 65) than in the dating violence group (DV; N = 69). Additionally, the authority foundation was able to increase the effectiveness of correctly classifying the participants in one group or the other by 29%. Finally, care and authority, along with fairness, served to predict justification of violence and self-perceived aggressiveness. The moral foundations approach provides preliminary evidence to better understand two specific types of youth violence and extract preventive educational and treatment strategies.
Highlights
Child-to-parent violence (CPV) and dating violence (DV) are early and apparently modern manifestations of violence and are especially alarming because the violent behavior manifests during the evolutionary development of the individual
Because it is not the same to usurp the legitimate authority of parents, who naturally must have more than their children, as it is to impose an illegitimate authority against a partner, who has equal rights and obligations in our current social system, we argue that this apparent similarity may rely on a different configuration of the moral foundations, where regard for care and authority could be lower in the CPV group than in the DV group
The general objective of this study is to further our knowledge of two specific types of violence through the five moral foundations by answering this research question: Can the five moral foundations be used to differentiate two types of youth violence (DV and CPV), depending on the relevance attributed to them, as well as predict relevant criterion variables for the treatment of young offenders? we argue that based on the moral foundations theory (MFT) (Haidt and Joseph, 2004), there is a clear difference between the violence of the CPV participants, who were condemned for harming and not respecting the legitimate authority of their parents, and the violence of the DV participants, who were condemned for trying to impose their authority on someone deemed equal in our society
Summary
Child-to-parent violence (CPV) and dating violence (DV) are early and apparently modern manifestations of violence and are especially alarming because the violent behavior manifests during the evolutionary development of the individual. One of them has been related to power and authority (Lips, 1991; Rudman and Glick, 2008). Most social systems have given power to men over women and parents over children (Wilson and Daly, 1992), and it is precisely in that direction that the majority of violence has been directed throughout history (Pinker, 2011). In the context of the so-called WEIRD societies (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic; Henrich et al, 2010), has the exercise of authority been called into question, and possibly, as a consequence of this, violence against children and violence against women have been decreasing worldwide (Straus and Gelles, 1986; Pinker, 2011). We see in Western countries that violence against women resist to
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