The famous "marshmallow experiment" is great evidence for this. When the original experiment was re-analyzed, researchers found that children from stable, consistent environments, with reliable trustworthy adults, were better able to withold temptation and show patience to win a "2 marshmallow" delayed reward in exchange for a sacrifice of "1 marshmallow" now.
Re:Raising a moral child
by not-gro-tsen on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @02:45PM
(#7593593)
As soon as he was old enough to understand, I showed my kid the marshmallow experiment and taught him a few ways to mess with the experimenter, if someone were to try this on him. Bwahaha.
Re:Raising a moral child
by tonyarkles on Tuesday April 15, 2014 @01:47PM
(#7593210)
For comparison's sake, it's neat to look at the psychological outcomes for children of alcoholics (where the element of consistency and predictability gets thrown right out the window). I realize that I'm a single anecdotal piece of data, but the good news is that therapy can help get over it :).
Reading behavioral psychology studies should require a skeptics hat. I'm not calling out these specific studies, but when it comes to miniscule sample sizes, unreproducible and sometimes out right made up results, this area is very suspect due to ease of fudging results. (Diederik Stapel comes to mind as an extreme case.)