Children orientation kohlberg

Human Development 2008;51:8–20 DOI: 10.1159/000112530 Reprint of Vita Humana 1963;6:11–33

The Development of Children’s Orientations Toward a Moral Order
I. Sequence in the Development of Moral Thought*
Lawrence Kohlberg
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, Ill.

Since the concept of a moral attitude forms the basic building block of the social psychological theories of Freud(1922), Durkheim (1906), Parsons (1960) and others, there is reason to agree with McDougall (1908) that “the fundamental problem of social psychology is the moralization of the individual by the society”. Following the leads of Freud and Durkheim, most social scientists have viewed moralization as a process of internalizing culturally given external rules through rewards, punishments, oridentification. Without questioning the view that the end point of the moralization process is one in which conduct is oriented to internal standards, one may well reject the assumption that such internal standards are formed simply through a process of “stamping in” the external prohibitions of the culture upon the child’s mind. From the perspective of a developmental psychology such as that of Piaget(1932) or J. M. Baldwin (1906), internal moral standards are rather the outcome of a set of transformations of primitive attitudes and conceptions. These transformations accompany cognitive growth in the child’s perceptions and orderings of a social world with which he is continuously interacting. Directed by this developmental conception of the moralization process, our research has been oriented tothe following tasks:

1. The empirial isolation of sequential stages in the development of moral thought. 2. The study of the relation of the development of moral thought to moral conduct and emotion. 3. The application of a stage analysis of moral judgment to subcultural differences as well as pathological deviance in moral orientations. 4. The isolation of the social forces and experiencesrequired for the sequential development of moral orientations. In the present paper, we shall summarize our findings as they relate to moralization as an agedevelopmental process, and we shall compare this characterization with that of Piaget.

The Isolation of Six Stages of Development in Moral Thought

Our developmental analysis of moral judgment is based upon data obtained from a core groupof 72 boys living in Chicago suburban areas. The boys were of three age groups: 10, 13, and 16. Half of each group was upper-middle class; half, lower to lower-middle class. For reasons to be discussed in the sequel to this paper, half of each group consisted of popular boys (according to classroom sociometric tests), while

* Part II: Social Experience, Social Conduct and the Development ofMoral Thought will appear in a subsequent issue of “ Vita Humana”.

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Dr. Lawrence Kohlberg Department of Psychology The University of Chicago Chicago 37, Ill. (USA)

half consisted of socially isolated boys. All the groups were comparablein I. Q. We have also used our procedures with a group of 24 delinquents aged 16, a group of 24 six-year-olds, and a group of 50 boys and girls aged 13 residing outside of Boston. The basic data were two-hour tape-recorded interviews focussed upon hypothetical moral dilemmas. Both the content and method of the interviews were inspired by the work of Piaget (1932). The ten situations used were onesin which acts of obedience to legal-social rules or to the commands of authority conflicted with the human needs or welfare of other individuals. The child was asked to choose whether one should perform the obedience-serving act or the needserving act and was then asked a series of questions probing the thinking underlying his choice. Our analysis of results commenced with a consideration of...