Not Just a (Morally) Dumb Jock: What Athletes Can Teach Us about the Complexity of Decision-Making about Aggression

AbstractNot Just a (Morally) Dumb Jock: What Athletes Can Teach Us about the Complexity of Decision-Making about Aggression By Kristin Amy Banas Doctor of Philosophy in Education University of California, Berkeley Professor Elliot Turiel, Chair Sport provides a unique context for the inquiry of moral decision-making about aggression as, in many ways, it is a space of sanctioned violence (e.g., tackling someone to the ground in American football), and its highly physical and highly competitive activities require that one thinks about the use of physical force on others and on oneself. Sport’s position as a bounded, largely voluntary activity also makes it ideal for studying the ways in which rules and authority, personal choice and consent, and the goals, purposes, expectations, and consequences of an activity factor into an individual’s reasoning about aggression and harm. Over the last four decades, there have been a small but growing number of studies that have looked at moral reasoning in the context of sport. Using frameworks such as social learning theory (Bandura, 1973, 1991) or Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development (Kohlberg, 1969), these studies regularly concluded that athletes, particularly those playing contact sports, used less mature forms of moral reasoning and were more approving of aggression than their non-athlete peers, and that the context of sport itself encouraged cheating and other harmful behavior in an effort to win. Two prominent explanations for this degradation in apparent moral aptitude in sport are moral disengagement (the use of rationalizations to separate oneself from the types of self-sanctions that typically dissuade individuals from immoral behavior; Bandura, 1999; Stanger et al., 2013) and bracketed morality (an alternative moral code that prioritizes self-oriented goals over the welfare and rights of others; Bredemeier & Shields, 1995). While this research has pointed to the idea that there is something different about the ways people reason about aggression in the context of sport, the overall conclusions that these researchers make about the moral reasoning of athletes oversimplifies the reasoning processes of individuals and the realities of learning and development in the context of sport, creating a deficit lens that contributes to harmful stereotypes particularly about the athletes of color who make up many high-contact sports. Using the alternative model of moral decision-making set forth by social domain theory (Turiel, 1983), this study re-examined the claims of previous researchers in an effort to survey the ways people make decisions about morally salient events like aggression, in highly physical contexts like sport. Social domain theory posits that people consider moral issues such as rights, fairness, and the welfare of others as important, prescriptive matters while also recognizing that when making decisions about the social environment, sometimes these concerns must be coordinated with other domains such as social and personal concerns. The first aim of the present study is to illustrate and get clarity on this process of making decisions about aggression as it plays out in the context of sport and understand the role context itself plays in moral decision-making. A second aim is to highlight the ways people first make meaning of their social environments and how such processes may transform even interpretations of what one considers harmful in a given context. A third aim is to compare reasoning across demographic groups, including sport experience, to see the ways prior experience impacts reasoning about physical aggression, both in and out of sport contexts. To do this, the present research used semi-structured interviews of 109 participants between the ages of 18 and 25 (M = 20.7 years; 52% female) of varying degrees of prior sport experience (33% non-athletes; 37% moderate athletes, and 29% elite, contact-sport athletes) to gather participants’ sense-making, evaluations, and justifications about acts of physical aggression (pain-causing hard pushes) that take place in social situations across sport and non-sport contexts. Results showed that while more participants approved of aggression in the sport context more than in the non-sport context in the abstract, when participants were given details that specified the intention and rationale behind the hard push, differences between contexts largely collapsed, with the majority of participants disapproving of the act of hard pushing across the situations in both sport and non-sport settings. Contrary to the findings of previous studies, there were no significant differences in the approval of hard pushing across the sport experience groups, though there existed some evidence that the contact-sport elite athletes interpreted the situations in the sport context differently than the other participant groups and that this had to do with the knowledge they have gained from playing sports at a high level for many years. Findings also showed that participants, including athletes, considered and often prioritized the integrity of the game, the importance of fairness, and the welfare of others, refuting previous conclusions about bracketed morality and moral disengagement. Lastly, the study showed ways that context and previous experience can transform the meaning of certain acts, rendering something like a hard push morally benign, given certain parameters. These findings have implications for the field of moral development, the understanding of decision-making about aggression, and the treatment of athletes.

Advisor: Turiel, Elliot