Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

Cognitive Developmental Theory: Piaget's Work

Although Piaget is most noted for his theory of cognitive stage development, in 1932, he published a highly influential book titled The Moral Judgment of the Child. Piaget asserted that a child's moral reasoning develops not merely as a function of internalizing the norms and values of an individual culture, but rather as a natural process of constructing ideas of justice and fairness largely through peer interaction. Through his interviews with children, Piaget identified three phases of moral reasoning development. He considered these phases, which sequentially included the nonmoral, the heteronomous, and the autonomous, to describe only developmental trends. He noted that children move from an external morality in which justice is judged by concrete events toward a morality judged by pragmatic acts of reciprocity and finally toward a more internalized morality in which just acts are judged by context, intentions, and an idealized sense of reciprocity.

Kohlberg's Theory of Stages

Except for some notable differences in methodology, which included the addition of adolescents to his subject sample and the use of dilemma vignettes in place of story pairs in his interviews, Kohlberg's 1955 [Page 562]dissertation study was initially intended to be an empirical extension and validation of Piaget's work. Instead, his dissertation results became the foundation for Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development, which, in later studies, departed somewhat from Piaget.

First, Kohlberg argued that his subject responses should be categorized not merely in terms of overlapping phases but rather in terms of six distinct stages. These are further classified by three levels: (1) the preconventional, which includes the first two stages; (2) the conventional, consisting of stages 3 and 4; and (3) the postconventional, which includes stages 5 and 6.

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