Kohlberg's Moral Development Studies

Beginning with his 1958 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg conducted a series of studies on moral reasoning, presenting boys aged ten, thirteen and sixteen, and later expanding his samples to younger children, girls, delinquents and participants from other American cities and countries, with a set of hypothetical moral dilemmas and analyzing the reasoning behind their answers rather than the answers themselves. The best known of these is the Heinz dilemma, in which a man named Heinz must decide whether to steal an unaffordable drug to save his dying wife's life, and Kohlberg's Moral Judgment Interview method asked participants to explain and justify their answer. Building on and extending Jean Piaget's earlier work on children's moral judgment, Kohlberg used the pattern of reasoning across many such dilemmas to propose six stages of moral development organized into three broader levels, preconventional, conventional and postconventional, describing a general progression from reasoning based on punishment and self-interest toward reasoning based on internalized ethical principles. Kohlberg's stage model became one of the most influential and most debated frameworks in the psychology of moral development, and it prompted extensive later research and criticism, including concerns about its cross-cultural applicability and possible gender bias in its original all-male sample.