Kohlberg

• Piaget had a theory of moral development that placed a structural approach on moral development suggesting that a person's morality develops from a social-cognitive and a social-emotional perspective. Piaget believed that children younger than 10 are focused on authority rather than evaluating their own actions based on morals, but that a moral compass is developed by adolescence.
• Kohlberg disagreed with Piaget and believed that moral development continued into early adulthood. This prompted him to develop a 3 level, 6 stage process of moral development to explain how moral reasoning develops.
• Kohlberg aimed to investigate development of moral reasoning throughout adolescence and early adulthood. He also wanted to assess the extent that these changes hold true in a range of cultural contexts.
• He studied 75 American boys aged 10 to 16 at the start of the study. They were followed at 3 year intervals throughout the ages of 22 to 28.

  Moral development was also studied in boys from the UK, Canada, Taiwan, Mexico and Turkey.
• This was a longitudinal study as it follows the moral development of the boys over 12 years. Snapshot research was also conducted in the cross cultural study.
• Procedure:

  • Each of the boys, at 3 year intervals, was presented with a hypothetical moral dilemma all deliberately philosophical,
  • The dilemmas were to determine the stage of moral reasoning for each of the 25 moral concepts,
  • Each dilemma involved options of different moral applications and the participants were asked what the character should do,
  • The cross-cultural participants were asked a moral dilemma about a man stealing food for his starving wife.
• Kohlberg found that moral development went through a series of 3 levels and 6 stages that were always passed through stage by stage in a fixed order and participants never went back to a previous stage. (constant across cultures)
• Pre-conventional level

  • Punishment and obedience orientation,
  • Instrumental-relativist orientation,

  Conventional level

  • Good boy/good girl orientation,
  • Law and Order orientation.

  Post-conventional level

  • Social construct orientation,
  • Universal principles orientation.
• One cross cultural differences was that stage 5 thinking was achieved at a later age in Mexico and Taiwan compared to the US.
• Kohlberg concluded that there is an invariant developmental sequence in moral development, and there is cultural universality of the stages. The six stage theory is not significantly affected by cultural differences, except about the rate of progress.