COGNITIVE STRUCTUIE, PUNISHMENT, AND NURTURANCE IN THE EXPERIMENTAL INDUCTION OF SELF-CRITICISM

Abstract

It is generally recognized that social behavior can be independently maintained in an individual through a variety of self-reinforcing consequences. Most contemporary treatments of internalized responses have been primarily concerned, however, with their prohibitive and punitive aspects. The commonly held view is that a child's reactions to his transgressions, and his inhibitory responses, become independent of the external sanctions from which they derive when he uses standards of judgment to evaluate his own actions. The phenomenon of guilt, for example, with its clearly implied cognitive properties of self-evaluation, is typically given a central place in mediating many different internalized responses to transgression. Freud (11, ch. 8), in setting forth the concept of the superego, stressed the role of self-critical resources based on the incorporation of parental Whiting and Child (33, ch. II) have used the tendency of people to blame themselves for their illnesses as an index of moral anxiety in a society. Sears, Maccoby, and Levin (30, ch. Io) regard self-instruction from the child's own standards of conduct as a fundamental criterion of conscience, and Ausubel (4) states that guilt is essential to fully internalized reactions. Other investigations by Heinecke (12) and by Miller, Swanson, et al. (20o) have taken intensity of guilt as an indicator of strength of superego formation or of severity of standards. The findings of a number of recent studies actually call into question the assumption that self-evaluation is requisite to internalized responses to transgression. Aronfreed (2) has described a detailed assessment of children's responses to transgression indicating that such responses take many forms and often occur in the absence of self-criticism. Reactions which are usually taken to be moral, such as confession and reparation, frequently