Lawrence Kohlberg (; October 25, 1927 – January 17, 1987) was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development.
He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget's account of children's moral development from 25 years earlier. He proposed that moral reasoning develops through six identifiable stages, grouped into three levels: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional, described in his framework of stages of moral development. His research showed that these stages appear in a fixed developmental sequence and reflect the increasing complexity of how people justify moral choices. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg's work reflected and extended not only Piaget's findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin.See Kohlberg, L. (1982), "Moral development," in J.M. Broughton & D.J. Freeman-Moir (Eds.), The Cognitive Developmental Psychology of James Mark Baldwin: Current Theory and Research in Genetic Epistemology, Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp. At the same time he was creating a new field within psychology: "moral development".
In an empirical study using six criteria, such as citations and recognition, Kohlberg was found to be the 30th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.Haggbloom, S.J. et al. (2002). The 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century. Review of General Psychology. Vol. 6, No. 2, 139–15. Haggbloom et al. combined three quantitative variables: citations in professional journals, citations in textbooks, and nominations in a survey given to members of the Association for Psychological Science, with three qualitative variables (converted to quantitative scores): National Academy of Sciences (NAS) membership, American Psychological Association (APA) President and/or recipient of the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and surname used as an eponym. Then the list was rank ordered.
Early life and education Lawrence Kohlberg was born in Bronxville, New York in 1927.See Fowler, J.W., Snarey, J., and DeNicola, K. (1988), Remembrances of Lawrence Kohlberg: A compilation of the presentations given at Service of Remembrance for Lawrence Kohlberg, at Memorial Church, Harvard University, on May 20, 1987, Atlanta, GA: Center for Research in Faith and Moral Development. He was the youngest of four children born to Jewish-German entrepreneur Alfred KohlbergKeeley, J. (1969), The China Lobby Man: The Story of Alfred Kohlberg, New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House. and his second wife, Charlotte Albrecht, a Christian German chemist. His parents separated when he was four years old, and finally divorced when he was 14. From 1933 to 1938, Lawrence and his three siblings rotated between their mother and father for six months at a time. This rotating custody of the Kohlberg children ended in 1938, when the children were allowed to choose the parent with whom they wanted to live.
Kohlberg attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. At age 18, at the end of World War II, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine.See Kohlberg, L. (1991), "My Personal Search for Universal Morality," in L. Kuhmerker (Ed.), The Kohlberg Legacy for the Helping Professions, Birmingham, AL: R.E.P. Books. He worked for a time with the Zionist Haganah on a ship smuggling Jewish refugees from Romania into Mandatory Palestine, evading the British blockade.Kohlberg, Laurence, "Beds for Bananas," The Menorah Journal, Autumn 1948, pp. 385–399.Rudolph W. Patzert, Running the Palestine Blockade, Airlife Publishing: Shrewsbury, England, 1994. Captured by the British and held at an internment camp on Cyprus, Kohlberg escaped with fellow crew members. He was in Palestine during the fighting in 1948 to establish the state of Israel, but refused to participate in the fighting and focused instead on nonviolent forms of activism. He also lived on a kibbutz during this time, until he was able to return to America in 1948.
After returning to the United States, Kohlberg enrolled at the University of Chicago. At the time it was possible to gain credit for courses by examination, and Kohlberg earned his bachelor's degree in one year, 1948. He then began study for his doctoral degree in psychology, which he completed at Chicago in 1958.
In those early years, Kohlberg read Jean Piaget's work. Kohlberg found a scholarly approach that gave a central place to the individual's reasoning in moral decision making. At the time this contrasted with the current psychological approaches of behaviorism and psychoanalysis that explained morality as simple internalization of external cultural or parental rules, through teaching using reinforcement and punishment or identification with a parental authority.Kohlberg, L. (1963). The development of children's orientations toward a moral order: I. Sequence in the development of moral thought. Vita Humana, 6(1–2), 11–33.
Career
Kohlberg's first academic appointment was at Yale University, as an assistant professor of psychology, 1958–1961.
Kohlberg spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in Palo Alto, California, 1961–1962, and then joined the Psychology Department of the University of Chicago as assistant, then associate professor of psychology and human development, 1962–1967. There he instituted the Child Psychology Training Program.
He held a visiting appointment at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1967–1968, and then was appointed Professor of Education and Social Psychology there, beginning 1968, where he remained until his death.
In 1969 he accepted Rebecca Shribman-Katz's invitation of the Society for Justice-Ethics-Morals (JEM) and visited Israel to study the morality of young people in that country. This was the beginning of the life-long cooperation between JEM and Kohlberg. JEM published many books in Hebrew under his supervision, merging Kohlberg's morality theory and Jewish morality and putting it into practice, in teaching justice, ethics and morals to judges, lawyers, teachers, police officers, prisoners and the young generation of Israel NLI
In 1978, Kohlberg invited Katz to participate in the conference of Law in a Free Society, which led to the research published in 1980 "Moral Education and Law-Related Education".
Research methodology Kohlberg's research approach centered on a semi-structured procedure known as the Moral Judgment Interview (MJI), which presented participants with a series of hypothetical moral dilemmas, such as the Heinz dilemma, the stealing medicine dilemma, and later, the doctor's dilemma.Colby, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1987). The Measurement of Moral Judgment. Cambridge University Press. During these interviews, participants were not evaluated on the moral choice they made but on the reasoning structures they used to justify those choices. Kohlberg argued that moral development is revealed in the organization of thought, not in agreement with any particular answer.Kohlberg, L. (1971). From is to ought. In T. Mischel (Ed.), Cognitive Development and Epistemology. Academic Press.
His methodology was strongly influenced by the clinical interview technique of Piaget, in which interviewers challenge a participant's reasoning to reveal underlying cognitive structures. Using a methodical methodology, Kohlberg created comprehensive scoring guidelines that divided answers into six levels of moral reasoning according to the justification's complexity, abstraction, and perspective-taking.Turiel, E. (1983). The Development of Social Knowledge: Morality and Convention. Cambridge University Press. Trained coders were needed for the scoring process, which prioritised structural consistency over isolated statements in each respondent's responses.
A distinctive feature of Kohlberg's methodology was his use of longitudinal research designs. He followed the same participants, 72 boys from Chicago, over more than a decade, re-interviewing them at regular intervals to examine how their moral reasoning evolved with age.Kohlberg, L., Levine, C., & Hewer, A. (1983). Moral Stages: A Current Formulation and a Response to Critics. Karger. This approach allowed him to document both progression and regression across stages and to argue that moral development followed an invariant sequence.
Kohlberg later expanded his methodology to include cross-cultural research, conducting studies in countries such as Mexico, Turkey, and Taiwan. These studies tested whether his stages were universal and whether reasoning patterns appeared in non-Western populations.Snarey, J. (1985). Cross-cultural universality of social-moral development: A critical review of Kohlbergian research. Psychological Bulletin, 97(2), 202–232. He also collaborated with colleagues to refine scoring criteria, producing the Standard Issue Scoring System, which increased reliability and addressed earlier criticisms of subjectivity. Kohlberg's methodological innovations helped establish moral reasoning as a measurable psychological construct and set the foundation for later tools such as the Defining Issues Test.
Stages of moral development
In his unpublished 1958 dissertation, Kohlberg described what are now known as Kohlberg's stages of moral development. These stages are planes of moral adequacy conceived to explain the development of moral reasoning. Created while studying psychology at the University of Chicago, the theory was inspired by the work of Jean Piaget and a fascination with children's reactions to moral dilemmas. Kohlberg proposed a form of "Socratic" moral education and reaffirmed John Dewey's idea that development should be the aim of education. He also outlined how educators can influence moral development without indoctrination and how public school can be engaged in moral education consistent with the United States Constitution.
Kohlberg's approach begins with the assumption that humans are intrinsically motivated to explore and become competent at functioning in their environments. In social development, this leads us to imitate role models we perceive as competent and to look to them for validation."Kohlberg, L. (1969), "Stage and sequence," Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, McGraw Hill: New York. Thus our earliest childhood references on the rightness of our and others' actions are adult role models with whom we are in regular contact. Kohlberg also held that there are common patterns of social life, observed in universally occurring social institutions, such as families, peer groups, structures, and procedures for clan or society decision-making, and cooperative work for mutual defense and sustenance. Endeavoring to become competent participants in such institutions, humans in all cultures exhibit similar actions and thoughts concerning the relations of self, others, and the social world. Furthermore, the more one is prompted to have empathy for the other person, the more quickly one learns to function well in cooperative human interactions.
The sequence of stages of moral development thus corresponds to a sequence of progressively more inclusive social circles (family, peers, community, etc.) within which humans seek to operate competently. When those groups function well, oriented by reciprocity and mutual care and respect, growing humans adapt to larger and larger circles of justice, care, and respect. Each stage of moral cognitive development is the realization in conscious thought of the relations of justice, care, and respect exhibited in a wider circle of social relations, including narrower circles within the wider.