Kohlberg

Question 1

What does tabula rasa mean?

Answer 1

• Blank slate

Question 2

What did Kohlberg believe about us at birth?

Answer 2

• At birth we’re all amoral, don’t recognise right from wrong.

Question 3

What does morality mean?

Answer 3

• Principles for how individuals ought to treat one another.

Question 4

What is the background?

Answer 4

Freud - morality develops at the end of the phallic stage, identify the same-sex parent and internalise their morals. Morality as superego develops.
Skinner - morality develops from the learning process, reward and punishment
Piaget - child goes through stages of moral development, don’t have cognitive capacity t behave morally until at a certain age.

Question 5

What are the aims?

Answer 5

• To show how, as young adolescents develop into young manhood, they move through the distinct levels and stages of moral development (in particular if people at stage 6 go through stage 5).
• To assess whether this process is the same cross-culturally.

Question 6

What are the research methods?

Answer 6

• Longitudinal (12 years)
• Self-report (2 hour semi-structured interview with 10 dilemmas)
• Quasi experiment (cross-cultural study)

Question 7

What are the IV’s?

Answer 7

• Age
• Culture

Question 8

What is the sample?

Answer 8

• 75 American boys, aged 10-16 years old, 3 year intervals through to 22-28 years old.
• Moral development also studied in other countries (e.g., Turkey, Canada, Mexico)

Question 9

What was the procedure?

Answer 9

• participants presented with hypothetical moral dilemmas in the form of short stories, were to determine each participants stage of moral reasoning for each of the 25 MD. aspects assessed included: the value of human life
• tested by asking:
  -> aged 10- ‘save the life of 1 important person or lots of unimportant people?’
  -> aged 13-24- ‘should the doctor mercy kill a fatally ill woman requesting death?’
• using different cultures: taiwanese asked about theft of food, young boys in UK, canada, mexico, turkey all tested in a similar way

Question 10

What were some findings (stages)?

Answer 10

• boys go through moral development stages, good support for how people change due to age
• if a boy was in stage 6, they had gone through stage 5
• not all participants reached stage 6
• stages were passed through in a fixed order
• a child in an earlier stage tends to move forward when confronted with a child in later stages views & seems to prefer this next stage

Question 11

What are some findings (cross cultural)?

Answer 11

• mexico and taiwan showed the same results
• moral thought increased steadily in mexico and turkey
• lower-class urban groups were intermediate in the rate of development
• no differences were found among different religions

Question 12

What was a conclusion?

Answer 12

• suggests that moral development is universal and applies to all boys