Moral Formation Across the Life-Course: A Social Cognitive–Relational Developmental Perspective

I argue that metatheories that inform social cognitive approaches to personality and relational developmental systems overlap in significant ways to provide an integrative framework for understanding moral formation across the lifecourse. Social cognitive theory describes how cognitive-affective units of early personality are solidified into autobiographical memory as a result of parental dialogic scaffolding. Goals, plans, and expectations of the moral self-as-agent are then folded into narrative form by young adulthood to create a moral identity that is action-guiding for the life-course. But moral identity will need to be fortified by features of moral wisdom to better confront the permanent adversities that invariably confound attempts to live a life that is good for one to live. Moral wisdom is held to be both personological (aligning with knowledge-and-appraisal aspects of personality architecture) and metacognitive (aligning with standard accounts of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive regulation processes).