Narrative Construction of Morality in Adolescence Among Typically Developing and Violence-Exposed Youth
Narrative Construction of Morality in Adolescence Among Typically Developing and Violence-Exposed Youth
Narrative Construction of Morality in Adolescence Among Typically Developing and Violence-Exposed Youth
Abstract
In this article, we explore two different perspectives on what narratives reveal about
differences in moral agency construction across contexts. We focus on contexts that
vary in violence exposure because such exposure has implications for the way youth
develop a sense of moral agency. We elicited narratives about harm-doing from three
samples of youth: a North American typical sample, a North American juvenile
delinquent sample, and a sample of Colombian displaced youth. The latter two
samples have in common a history of significant exposure to violence. Our results
show reductions in psychological content (e.g., references to emotions, thoughts,
and desires) and increases in reciprocity and vengeful themes among violence-
exposed youth, particularly in the context of narrating their own harmful actions.
We consider the meaning of these differences from two different perspectives about
the meaning of narratives.
Keywords
narrative, culture, violence exposure, war, morality
1
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
2
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia
Corresponding Author:
Monisha Pasupathi, University of Utah, UT, United States.
Email: pasupath@psych.utah.edu
Pasupathi et al. 179
Note the emphasis on both her own and her friend’s psychological experiences
(wanted, thought, felt, expected, and remember), and the depiction of the harm-
ful act as inevitable, though regrettable, in a world with varied opportunities and
thoroughly comprehensible. Notably infrequent in adolescent accounts from
North American typical samples are accounts of harm in terms of tit-for-tat
sequences of actions without extensive consideration of the psychological experi-
ences of all involved. The absence of tit-for-tat accounts is striking because
180 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)
reciprocity norms characterize most human societies and are important facets
of morality (Eisenberger, Lynch, Aselage, & Rohdieck, 2004; Ensminger &
Henrich, 2014).
society (e.g., Govier, 2002; Tyler, 2006). In fact, both in the context of gang
violence (e.g., Decker, 1996; Papachristos, Hurea, & Braga, 2013) and in the
context of the American South (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996), scholars have specu-
lated that reciprocity intended to maintain a balance of wrongs between groups
accounts for higher levels of violence in these contexts. As a result, we might
expect that among violence-exposed youth, reciprocity focused and even venge-
ful narratives about harm might be more prevalent than what we have observed
among North American typical samples.
In sum, we are making two predictions about differences between violence-
exposed and North American typical youth’s construction of moral agency and
use of reciprocity themes in narratives about harm. Violence-exposed youth,
compared with North American typical samples, might be less likely to construct
a complex and psychologically embedded sense of moral agency in narrating
harm, and this would be reflected in lower levels of psychological content (e.g.,
references to one’s own and others’ emotions, thoughts, and desires) in their
narratives about harm. We have also suggested that violence-exposed youth
might be more prone than North American typical samples to construct narra-
tives that are framed around reciprocity and revenge concerns. Tests of group
differences in narrative represent a relatively simple design from a methodo-
logical standpoint (although there are always methodological complexities in
making cross-group comparisons). Here, we want to focus on how two different
perspectives on narrative methods, despite converging on a single group-
comparison design, would mean somewhat distinct interpretations of the findings.
Narratives as Windows
In the window view, narratives about harm reflect the state of individuals’ moral
agency and their capacity to engage with the complex trade-offs of moral life.
From this vantage point, narratives reveal developmental and cultural processes
that have taken place prior to the moment of narration. The more subtle and
complex construals of moral agency that are revealed in adolescents’ narratives
about harm, relative to their younger counterparts, are not intrinsically narrative
in nature. Rather, the narrative that reveals those more sophisticated moral
Pasupathi et al. 183
moral agency, and the only article to report on reciprocity and vengeance. Our
second aim was to examine whether violence exposure is related to differences in
the nature and prevalence of narratives structured around themes of reciprocity
and revenge.
In addition, a third goal of the present study is related to considering the
implications of our findings from the vantage point of the two perspectives on
narrative methodologies outlined above—if we consider narratives as a window
onto underlying psychological constructs, what follows from these findings? If,
alternatively, we consider narrative as a constructive process that in the aggregate,
actually constitutes self and culture, what different implications follow from the
differences we identify? We return to these issues in the Discussion section.
Method
Participants
This article presents comparisons of three samples drawn from other projects,
with each sample described later. We use the term violence-exposed youth to
refer to both the North American juvenile delinquent youth, and the Colombian
displaced youth collectively.
Juvenile delinquent North American youth. Forty male adolescents (mean age ¼ 16.5
years, range from 14 to 18 years) who were serving time at a youth corrections
facility for committing a violent offense (previously reported in Wainryb et al.,
2010). The included youth had a significant history of criminal activity with
multiple offenses and represented a sample with high exposure to, and involve-
ment in, violent activity. No additional background information was collected
from this sample.
Colombian displaced youth. Colombia’s decades-long civil war has led to the dis-
placement of millions of individuals, with a large concentration relocating to
shanty towns outside the capital of Bogota (Posada & Wainryb, 2008). Forty-
seven adolescents were recruited from a slum area in Bogota, Colombia, that
houses a large concentration of displaced individuals (mean age ¼ 14.6,
range ¼ 13–17); given established changes in narrating and moral agency over
this age range (e.g., Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b) we included only those teens
older than 14 years, leaving a sample size of 32 adolescents, mean age ¼ 15.1,
SD ¼ .8; 16 males. Because one participant provided no narratives, and some
participants provided only a victim or only a perpetrator narrative (n ¼ 3; two
Pasupathi et al. 185
with no victim and one with no perpetrator), sample sizes vary slightly for the
analyses reported later. Recruitment and other procedures are described in
Posada and Wainryb (2008); this sample had a high level of exposure to violence,
as described there.
Measures
Narrative length. We examined the length of the narratives in idea units (roughly
equivalent to verb phrases). Length was the total number of idea units in each
narrative.
Reciprocity and revenge. Two coders fluent in Spanish and English trained with the
first author on a subset of narratives and then coded all of the narratives for the
presence of reciprocity themes using a four-category scheme. Incomprehensible
narratives were those where the harmful actions ‘‘came out of nowhere’’ and
made no sense for the reader (e.g., narrator reports beating up another kid after
seeing that kid look at the narrator’s car). Comprehensible but nonreciprocal
narratives explained the harmful action in a coherent way but did not rely on
reciprocal exchanges of harms as part of that explanation (e.g., narrator
described upsetting a friend because of skipping her birthday party to attend
a concert; narrator explains robbing someone at gunpoint because of his need
for money to purchase drugs). Reciprocity-based narratives included accounts
which depicted both parties harming one another in sequential ways, even when
the account was not explicitly noting this as a tit-for-tat situation (e.g., narrator
describes how a friend disclosed his secret, after which he spread a rumor about
that friend; narrator describes being mocked by classmates, after which he put
one of them in a chokehold). We employed this relatively lenient definition to
ensure that we were open to evidence of reciprocity norms even when those
186 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)
Procedure
While the full procedures are described in more detail elsewhere (see Wainryb et al.,
2005 for the North American typical sample; Wainryb et al., 2010 for the North
American delinquent sample, and Posada & Wainryb, 2008 for the Colombian
displaced sample), all three samples provided a narrative about an instance where
they had harmed someone else. In the North American typical sample and
Colombian displaced sample, participants were interviewed individually and
were asked to describe a ‘‘time when you did or said something, and someone
else felt hurt by it’’ (perpetrator), and a ‘‘time when someone else did or said
something, and you felt hurt by it’’ (victim). The order of the two accounts was
counterbalanced. Interviewers provided nonspecific prompting aimed at eliciting
the most completely elaborated narrative possible. Interviews were conducted in
participants’ native language (English or Spanish, respectively) by native speakers.
North American delinquent youth were interviewed about their family his-
tories and social relationships (Cloward & Florsheim, 1995) and were asked
about a ‘‘time when you became violent.’’ Note that these youth therefore
provided only a perpetrator account; prompt differences must be taken into
account when interpreting the findings.
Results
Analyses are reported separately for perpetrator and victim accounts, because
not all three groups provided both types of narratives. Tables 1 and 2 present
descriptive data for the major analyses reported later. Unless otherwise noted,
we employed analysis of variance-based analyses of primary dependent measures
with group as a between-subjects factor.
Table 1. Length and Percentage of Factual and Interpretive Content in Youth’s Narratives.
Perpetrator Victim
Total length in unitsc (SD) 58.7 (32.6) 69.6 (58.3) 49.0 (44.3) 76.9 (66.2) 47.7 (40.0)
Percentage of facts (SD) 57.0 (18.8) 72.0 (14.9) 52.2 (16.3) 56.9 (19.0) 54.5 (17.8)
Percentage of 37.1 (17.7) 28.0 (14.9) 25.8 (11.7) 37.1 (17.2) 23.1 (17.0)
interpretations (SD)
a
Data taken from Pasupathi and Wainryb (2010b).
b
Data taken from Wainryb et al. (2010).
c
Includes interview-related, filler, and uncodeable units.
p > .21. For victim events, the North American typical sample generated signifi-
cantly longer events than did the Colombian displaced sample, F(1, 56) ¼ 4.2,
p < .05. Because the groups differed somewhat in the length of their narratives,
we focused on proportions of interpretive content in our analyses.
F(2, 95) ¼ 4.7, p < .02, with the North American typical sample narrating more
proportionally interpretative perpetrator events than either North American
juvenile delinquents or Colombian displaced youth. For victim narratives,
Table 1 shows that North American typical youth narrated stories with propor-
tionally more interpretive content compared with Colombian displaced youth,
F(1, 56) ¼ 9.7, p < .003.
Victim accounts. As shown in Table 2, victim accounts did not differ as a function
of participant group, 2(3) ¼ 1.1, p > .77. The most frequent type of account for
both groups was incomprehensible. When vengeance themes were present, the
accounts pointed to narrator revenge 44% of the time, both parties 11% of the
time, and vengeance on the part of the other person 44% of the time. Note that in
a victim account, conceptualizing the perpetrator as having acted out of vengeful
desires implicates the victim, albeit only partially, in the exchange of harms.
Discussion
Recall that we had three main goals for the project: (a) to examine differences in
moral agency constructed in narratives about harm among samples of North
American typically developing, North American juvenile delinquent, and
Colombian displaced youth, (b) to examine differences in the use of reciprocity
and revenge to structure harm narratives in these three samples, and (c) to
consider the implications of our findings within two different frameworks for
narrative methods. Below, we take each of these issues in turn, considering
limitations of our study throughout where pertinent.
American typical youth’s narratives, for both perpetrator and victim events.
Importantly, both violence-exposed samples included younger adolescents
than the North American typical sample—and in North American and other
typical samples, the proportions of interpretive content and related features of
narrative meaning-making increase over adolescence (Köber, Schmiedek, &
Habermas, 2015; McLean & Breen, 2009; Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010b).
However, the difference between typical and violence-exposed samples is unli-
kely to be completely an artifact of age differences. Rather, the difference
between the samples may lie in the greater severity of the harms described by
violence-exposed youth (for reviews, see Wainryb et al., 2010; Wainryb &
Pasupathi, 2009). It is possible, or even likely, that more severe harms challenge
youth’s capacities to rely on psychological concepts to make sense of their own
and others’ harm-doing.
But beyond the severity of the harms described by violence-exposed youth in
our study is the ubiquity and pervasiveness of harm in their social worlds
(Posada & Wainryb, 2008; Wainryb et al., 2010). This combination of severity,
ubiquity, and pervasiveness poses difficult challenges to building a sense of
moral agency. Because agency has to do with making sense of moral actions
in light of psychological experience, when severe immoral actions happen all the
time and everywhere, conceptualizing one’s own moral agency may seem of
limited use for the individual.
1994). Only one quarter of the North American typical sample generated such
narratives. In addition, it is noteworthy that the differences emerged in the per-
petrator narratives, where revenge is an explanation for harmful actions toward
others as well as a consequence of those actions. While North American typical
youth can certainly generate ideas about revenge (Recchia et al., 2017), they
typically do so when considering experiences in which they were victims, not
when they were perpetrators. The pattern among violence-exposed youth is part
of a conflation of perpetration and victimization, in which narratives depict an
ongoing flow of one harm after another, either evenly balanced or in some cases
escalating.
Consider the following example from a 16-year-old Colombian displaced
youth (translated from the original):
One day I hit a kid, and everyone looked at me like I was so abusive. But that’s
because he took my stuff. I hit him with my fist. First I told him to give my stuff
back, and he didn’t do it, so that made me mad, and I hit him with my fist. And
everyone yelled at me, and everyone hit me.
Note that the only psychological reference in this narrative is to being angry,
with the remaining content focusing on observable behaviors by the narrator
and others. There is no attempt to understand the other person’s behavior, and
the entire episode is structured as a sequence of harmful actions that beget
further harmful actions. Similar patterns are evident in the juvenile delinquent
sample. While we did not have female delinquent participants, the similarity of
the patterns in the two violence-exposed samples suggests that the phenomenon
is not gender specific.
norms are not absent among North American typical samples is that they do
occur, even in the data presented here. For example, a 15-year-old male from
that sample narrated the following:
. . . I kind of remember me and my best friend last summer, He was kind of talking
to his girlfriend on the phone and I just kind of and I came out and just said
something because he is just really tall and skinny so I called him lurpy and his
girlfriend started laughing and I just thought that it was kind of playful or whatever
but he got really angry so he ran into the room and we kind of started yelling at
each other a lot and then we forgot to hang up the phone and we started fighting
you know like fists and stuff so but uh. So she heard everything and then they broke
up the next day so I felt really bad about that. But it was o.k. in the end because
we’re still friends now.
While there is somewhat more psychological content than in our prior example
from the Colombian sample, there is still an emphasis here on observable behav-
iors and an escalating exchange of harmful acts. Beyond the present data, more
vengeful and reciprocity-based thinking among North American typical samples
can also be seen in comparisons of narratives about sibling and friend
harm—the forgiving, generous, nonvengeful, and subtle moral agents that told
the North American typical stories for this study may be the same people who
tell ruthless, vengeful, and intentionally harmful narratives about things they
have done to their siblings (Recchia et al., 2013). Much of the world, as has been
pointed out elsewhere, is not weird. In less weird places, relationships may have
more obligatory qualities and be linked to the provision of material supports as
well as psychological supports (as is the case, arguably, for sibling relationships
in the United States). Such differences can fundamentally alter the experience,
implications, and navigation of harm-doing. In other words, reciprocity and
revenge, despite their limitations in terms of promoting cycles of harm, may
be quite usual and prevalent ways of structuring harm narratives, if we were
to look broadly enough.
and emotions; these differences in experiences are reflected in the way they narrate
harm. Finally, in violent contexts, youth understand harmful behavior as
enmeshed in exchange sequences of harms—cycles of reciprocity and even venge-
fulness. The implications of these differences may be problematic in terms of
perpetuating harmful behaviors among individuals but are also sensible insofar
as the differences reflect differences in the everyday worlds encountered by youth.
As windows, narratives can also reveal that all youth must struggle with the
inevitability of harmful actions, juxtaposed with the wide agreement that
hurting others is morally wrong. The ubiquity, severity, and pervasiveness of
harm alter some aspects of how this struggle plays out, but the youth we studied
faced the dilemma of having hurt others, and having been hurt by others, while
viewing harm as wrong. Thus, narratives are windows that can simultaneously
reflect commonalities and variations in human experience, and as such, are a
powerful tool in the methodological toolkit for developmental and cultural
psychologists (Fivush & Nelson, 2004; McLean & Syed, 2015; Reese et al.,
2007; Wang, 2004).
As a constitutive developmental process, our narratives both reveal differ-
ences in the way youth build a sense of moral agency from their experiences and
also suggest how youth’s narratives shape that sense of contextualized moral
agency in prospective ways. There is ample evidence from weird samples that
narrating experiences promotes the development of memory, self, and morality
(Fivush & Nelson, 2004; Laible & Thompson, 2002; Pasupathi & Wainryb,
2010a; Reese et al., 2007), and comparative evidence that narrating also
shapes memory, self, and morality in ways that are contextually situated
within cultures and families (McLean, 2016; Pratt et al., 2001; Reese et al.,
2014; Wang, Leichtman, & Davies, 2000). From this view, the narrative differ-
ences we observe can be the starting point for efforts to scaffold youth’s devel-
opment of moral agency—they provide a sense of where youth are and a
potential opportunity to move youth toward a more subtle and complex sense
of moral agency, or away from vengeful themes. Importantly, just as some
North American typical youth narrate with reciprocity themes and sparse psy-
chological content, some violence-exposed youth narrate with more psycho-
logical content and more comprehensible and nonreciprocal accounts, and
perhaps many such youth could do so for at least some of their experiences.
Consider the following narrative from a 14-year-old male Colombian displaced
adolescent (translated):
Sometimes I upset my brother, but it’s just to make a joke. But he gets really upset,
and so then we end up fighting about it. So one time, I started talking to a cousin of
mine, and my brother thought that I was excluding him. He doesn’t like it when I
talk to other people – he feels excluded, he feels like I’m rejecting him. There’s
always these misunderstandings because of that. We almost never fight [physically]
about it, but that time, he thought that I was trying to upset him on purpose, but it
194 Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37(2)
wasn’t on purpose. It was a joke. So I didn’t think he was going to become furious.
But he got really mad, and then we got into a fistfight.
This narrative contains quite a lot of psychological insights about both the
narrator and the victim and is not built around tit-for-tat actions although
the events described could certainly be narrated in that way. This type of nar-
rative, which may be infrequent, but does occur in the sample, provides some
sense that there is a reservoir for scaffolding different moral understandings.
Our findings suggest some possible limitations about the extent to which
narrative as a developmental process can shift moral agency, however. First,
victim narration may be more difficult as a place to promote growth in under-
standings of moral agency and shifts in reciprocal narration—although victim
narration with reciprocity themes often involves at least tacit acknowledgment
of involvement or complicity. Perpetrator experiences or narratives may afford
more complexity and a more feasible route to shaping and scaffolding more
complex understandings. Because most youth (and indeed, people) experience
harm from both victim and perpetrator perspectives, using perpetrator narration
as a tool to scaffold moral development should ultimately allow youth to hold
nuanced views of moral agency even in the context of being victimized.
Second, inasmuch as the summation of individuals’ narratives about their
lived experience also serves, in the aggregate, to build culturally shared under-
standings, the individual process of constructing some type of moral agency is
also an act of cultural construction, negotiation, and maintenance or change.
If our intuitions are correct concerning the proposition that the ‘‘weird’’
‘‘comprehensible but non-reciprocal’’ narratives of harm provided by the
North American typical samples have at least some beneficial properties, that
approach to narrating harm at the individual level can be part of the process of
constructing a society with reduced vulnerabilities to cycles of harm. In this
view, culturally particular patterns—whether peace promoting or violence main-
taining—can also be altered, one story at a time. That said, violent contexts may
also constrain the extent to which narrative can shift participants’ sense of
themselves and others as moral agents, because the relations between individ-
uals’ narratives about their everyday experiences with harm are reciprocally
intertwined with extant cultural understandings and norms (McLean & Syed,
2015). When vengeful actions are normative, the extent to which individual
narration can change the cultural story may be limited, and one of the most
important directions for future work is to investigate the degree of developmen-
tal potential in individual narratives, across diverse cultural contexts.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.
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Author Biographies
Monisha Pasupathi is professor of Psychology at the University of Utah. Her
research interests include narrative, identity, social and emotional development,
and moral development.