Abstracts - Earli

KN1 329 August 2007 12:30 - 13:30Room: HarmóniaInvited PaperPainful Learning and learning for hope: On the difference betweenteachers work for moral growth and for religious/spiritual changeFritz K. Oser, University of Fribourg, SwitzerlandChair:Pietro Boscolo, University of Padova, ItalyI will address moral development in context, and religious and spiritual growth with respect toacting in situations. One phenomenon concerns the "unhappy moralist effect." Persons that have todecide between being moral or successful, feel unhappy if they choose morality as a steeringpower. Consider a negotiation in which instead of slightly cheating and thereby receiving moremoney, someone chooses to be moral, feels bad afterwards, and thinks he/she doesn’t have enoughself-efficacy to manage life. Another effect, from comparing three generations (grand-parents,parents and grand-children), is that the grand-children’s responsibility for moral and religiousvirtues is mostly either value-lower or higher than the other two generations. The statement "I donot like to share with others" on a Lickert four-point-scale was weighted higher by grand-children.In contrast, children value virtue justice lower than other generations. Additionally, all threegenerations weight the spiritual behavior as very important, whereas grandparents show a higherestimation towards religious judgment and religious belief. Strong moral or social norms thatprotect children and adolescents (like not taking drugs) are mostly rated very high. Finally, studieson the correlation between moral mistakes/moral transgressions and religious mistakes or religiousjudgment indicate that intervention programs show a conceptual change with respect to exclusion,xenophobia and rightwing orientation. One unexpected result is that students who are insecurewith their attitude towards strangers and immigrants grow toward more integrative behavior. Butstudents who are right-wing at the beginning are even more right-wing oriented after theintervention. They use or misuse the argumentation of integrative tendencies for their owncounter-arguments. How can we scientifically, strategically and diagnostically deal with thisphenomenon? Finally, I will show the necessity to combine vertical stage-oriented growth withhorizontal change. Intervention studies are only successful in this combination with respect tomoral and religious/spiritual learning.– 248 –