Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 75 of 91
Conscience and internalized rules
Turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to explain proactive moral behavior, like voluntarily helping someone cross the street. Even enlightened self-interest does not fully explain certain types of human altruism. The road between moral reasoning and moral behavior is quite rocky. In fact, the concept of “conscience” was developed in a partial attempt to pave over this difficulty. A conscience is something that makes you feel good when you do good things and makes you feel bad when you don’t. The late Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg believed that a healthy conscience was the top rung in the ladder of all moral reasoning. But not all scientists think conscience is innate. Some think it’s a social construct. For them, internalization is the most important measure of moral awareness. A child who can resist the temptation to defy some moral norm, even when the possibility of detection and punishment is zero, has internalized the rule. These children not only know what is proper, an awareness that might have been preloaded into their brains, but they now agree with it and attempt to align their behaviors accordingly. This is also sometimes called inhibitory control, which sounds suspiciously like well-developed executive function. They may be the same thing. Either way, a willingness to make the right choices—and to withstand pressure to make the wrong ones, even in the absence of a credible threat or in the presence of a reward—is the goal of moral development. Which means your parenting objective is to get your child to pay attention to and align himself with his innate sense of right and wrong. This takes time. A lot of time.