ABSTRACT
Modern psychology and psychiatry have tended to drift away from concern with problems of ethics and moral values. Normative growth in conscience development reflects both gains in cognitive maturity and age-level changes in personality organization. Presatellizing conscience, for the most part, involves little more than the development of inhibitory control on the basis of learning to anticipate and avoid punishment. In the late satellizing stage, reinforcement of the sense of moral obligation is provided primarily by guilt feelings. Nonsatellizers obviously fail to undergo the various changes in conscience development associated with satellization and, similarly, the changes resulting from desatellization. A general problem transcending social-class differences is the impact of culture on conscience development when serious discrepancies or inconsistencies prevail between the professed moral ideology of the culture and the ideology that is really believed and actually practiced. It has already been observed that differential social environment within a culture exerts a profound influence on various aspects of ego development.
