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Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

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Evidence · 1 claim (1 for) · 1 study (1 theoretical), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 1 claim rests on one study

Description

Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987), building directly on Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development, proposed that moral reasoning — not moral behavior or the specific choice a person makes — develops through three levels and six stages. Kohlberg assessed stage using the Moral Judgment Interview, a semi-structured interview (established in his 1958 dissertation) that scores the structure of a person's justification for a moral choice, not the choice itself. His signature instrument is the Heinz dilemma: a man, Heinz, cannot afford a drug that could save his dying wife; should he steal it? The "right" answer is irrelevant to scoring — a person can justify either "steal it" or "don't steal it" from any of the six stages, and it is the form of the justification that reveals the stage.

Following Piaget's constructivist requirements for a stage model, Kohlberg held the six stages to be invariant (no skipping) and essentially non-regressive. Progression occurs when a person's current stage of reasoning proves inadequate to resolve a new dilemma, pushing them toward the next stage's more differentiated notion of justice — built from the "justice operations" of equality and reciprocity, resolving toward reversibility (a rule a person could accept regardless of which party they were).

Levels and Stages

  • Level 1 — Preconventional (egocentric; typical of children, possible in adults)
  • Stage 1: Obedience and punishment orientation — "How can I avoid punishment?"
  • Stage 2: Self-interest orientation — "What's in it for me?"
  • Level 2 — Conventional (typical of adolescents and most adults; judges morality against society's norms)
  • Stage 3: Interpersonal accord and conformity — "good boy/good girl" reasoning
  • Stage 4: Authority and social-order-maintaining orientation — "law and order"
  • Level 3 — Postconventional / Principled (rare — many people never reach this level)
  • Stage 5: Social contract orientation — laws are changeable social contracts serving "the greatest good for the greatest number"
  • Stage 6: Universal ethical principles — Kantian, self-chosen, categorical; Kohlberg struggled to find anyone who consistently reasoned here

A transitional Stage 4½ is sometimes noted — disaffection with arbitrary law-and-order reasoning, often seen in students entering college — along with a speculative, evidentially unsupported seventh stage ("Transcendental" or "Cosmic" morality) linking religion and moral reasoning, which Kohlberg himself treated as tentative.

Criticisms

Kohlberg's theory has drawn sustained criticism. Carol Gilligan, a former student of Kohlberg's, argued the theory is androcentric — built on all-male original samples — and undervalues an "ethic of care" alongside the theory's emphasis on abstract justice; research since has generally found no consistent gender difference in moral-reasoning stage, tempering the strongest form of Gilligan's critique while keeping the justice-vs-care framing alive as a live discussion (see Gilligan's Ethic of Care for the full framework). Turiel's Social Domain Theory raises a more structural challenge: children differentiate moral, societal, and personal domains of social knowledge from early in development, meaning a person's reasoning in one domain doesn't necessarily predict their reasoning in another — in tension with the idea of a single, unified stage of moral development (see Turiel's Social Domain Theory). A cultural-bias critique notes that while the stage order replicates across cultures, the rate of progression differs; Kohlberg's own rebuttal is that stages track a mode of reasoning, not the content of any particular culture's beliefs. Social intuitionists (notably Jonathan Haidt) argue moral judgments are often made intuitively first, with "reasoning" arriving after as post-hoc justification — a challenge to the theory's core assumption that reasoning drives judgment. Directly relevant to instructional design: moral reasoning stage does not reliably predict moral behavior. Classroom cheating research (Hartshorne & May, 1928–1930; Kline, 2017; Leming, 2008) has found that whether a student cheats is largely situation-specific, regardless of the student's measured moral-development stage — a caution against assuming that raising a class's stage of moral reasoning is sufficient to change behavior.

Implications

Context

  • Stages cannot be skipped, and regression is extremely rare — instruction premised on this theory should meet a learner at their current stage rather than assume higher stages can simply be taught by explanation
  • Preconventional reasoning: mainly children (also some adults); Conventional: adolescents and most adults, who tend to remain at Stage 4; Postconventional: rare — arguably a minority of adults reach Stage 5, and Stage 6 is nearly unobserved in practice

Target Learners

  • K–12 learners across the developmental span, since the theory is most often applied to character/moral education in schools
  • Learners in contexts where academic integrity, ethical reasoning, or civic/social responsibility are explicit goals

Target Learning Objectives

  • Development of more differentiated, principled moral reasoning over time
  • Distinguishing moral reasoning (what a person can articulate and justify) from moral behavior (what a person actually does), since the two do not reliably track each other

Claims

Examples

Key Sources

  • Ashton, P., & Huitt, W. (1980). Egocentrism-sociocentrism: The dynamic interplay in moral development. In J. Magary, P. Taylor, & G. Lubin (Eds.), Piagetian theory and the helping professions (Vol. 9, pp. 293-297). Association for the Study of Piagetian Theory.
  • Haggbloom, S. J., Warnick, R., Warnick, J. E., Jones, V. K., Yarbrough, G. L., McGahhey, R., ... Monte, E. (2002). The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Review of General Psychology, 6(2), 139-154. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.6.2.139
  • Hartshorne, H., & May, M. (1928-1930). Studies in the nature of character. Macmillan.
  • Kline, J. T. (2017). Morality, cheating, and the purpose of public education. Retrieved from http://preserve.lehigh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3663&context=etd
  • Leming, J. S. (2008). Research and practice in moral and character education: Loosely coupled phenomena. In L. P. Nucci & D. Narvaez (Eds.), Handbook of moral and character education (pp. 134-157). Routledge.
  • Nucci, L. P. (2009). Nice is not enough: Facilitating moral development. Merrill/Prentice Hall.
  • Huitt, W. (2004). Moral and character development. Educational Psychology Interactive. Retrieved from http://www.edpsycinteractive.org/morchr/morchr.html
  • Zhou, M., & Brown, D. (Eds.). (2015). Theory of moral development. In Educational learning theories (2nd ed.). GALILEO Open Learning Materials.
Page metadata
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type theory
title Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development
description Kohlberg's cognitive-developmental theory holds that moral reasoning develops through six invariant, hierarchically-ordered stages grouped into three levels, as a person's current stage proves inadequate for new moral dilemmas.
status review
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