New tools, new insights: Kohlberg’s moral judgement stages revisited

Rethinking Norm Psychology

Norms permeate human life. Most of people's activities can be characterized by rules about what is appropriate, allowed, required, or forbidden-rules that are crucial in making people hyper-cooperative animals. In this article, I examine the current cognitive-evolutionary account of "norm psychology" and propose an alternative that is better supported by evidence and better placed to promote interdisciplinary dialogue. The incumbent theory focuses on rules and claims that humans genetically inherit cognitive and motivational mechanisms specialized for processing these rules. The cultural-evolutionary alternative defines normativity in relation to behavior-compliance, enforcement, and commentary-and suggests that it depends on implicit and explicit processes. The implicit processes are genetically inherited and domain-general; rather than being specialized for normativity, they do many jobs in many species. The explicit processes are culturally inherited and domain-specific; they are constructed from mentalizing and reasoning by social interaction in childhood. The cultural-evolutionary, or "cognitive gadget," perspective suggests that people alive today-parents, educators, elders, politicians, lawyers-have more responsibility for sustaining normativity than the nativist view implies. People's actions not only shape and transmit the rules, but they also create in each new generation mental processes that can grasp the rules and put them into action.

Bateson and Wright on Number and Quantity: How to Not Separate Thinking from Its Relational Context

As part of his explication of the epistemological error made in separating thinking from its ecological context, Bateson distinguished counts from measurements. With no reference to Bateson, the measurement theory and practice of Benjamin Wright also recognizes that number and quantity are different logical types. Describing the confusion of counts and measures as schizophrenic, like Bateson, Wright, a physicist and certified psychoanalyst, showed mathematically that convergent stochastic processes informing counts are predictable in ways that facilitate methodical measurements. Wright’s methods experimentally evaluate the complex symmetries of nonlinear and stochastic numeric patterns as a basis for estimating interval quantities. These methods also retain connections with locally situated concrete expressions, mediating the data display by contextualizing it in relation to the abstractly communicable and navigable quantitative unit and its uncertainty. Decades of successful use of Wright’s methods in research and practice are augmented in recent collaborations of metrology engineers and psychometricians who are systematically distinguishing numeric counts from measured quantities in new classes of knowledge infrastructure. Situating Wright’s work in the context of Bateson’s ideas may be useful for infrastructuring new political, economic, and scientific outcomes.

Growth charts of human development

This article reviews and compares two types of growth charts for tracking human development over age. Both charts assume the existence of a continuous latent variable, but relate to the observed data in different ways. The D-score diagram summarizes developmental indicators into a single aggregate score measuring global development. The relations between the indicators should be consistent with the Rasch model. If true, the D-score is a measure with interval scale properties, and allows for the calculation of meaningful differences both within and across age. The stage line diagram describes the natural development of ordinal indicators. The method models the transition probabilities between successive stages of the indicator as smoothly varying functions of age. The location of each stage is quantified by the mid- P-value. Both types of diagrams assist in identifying early and delayed development, as well as finding differences in tempo. The relevant techniques are illustrated to track global development during infancy and early childhood (0–2 years) and Tanner pubertal stages (8–21 years). New reference values for both applications are provided.

Reconciling Competing Tensions in Ethical Systems

Ethical codes and the systems in which they are situated are complex and intricate, making them difficult for both academicians and practitioners to research and understand. Through a qualitative research lens we examine the honor and ethics system at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Our findings suggest that the complexity of ethical systems can be better understood by examining the competing tensions that simultaneously work for and against ethical systems. We find that organizational members at West Point engage in counterintuitive thinking along with reframing and repositioning to negotiate some of these tensions. This approach provides feedback loops that steer the organization away from future ethical failures and long-term ethical declines. Our findings build on and extend several organizational and ethical theories to include environmental scanning, moral awareness, peer justice, the stages of moral development, and hyper-resiliency. We discuss implications for both theory and practice.

Construction and testing of the Moral Development Scale for Professionals (MDSP)

Moral development among students is central for nursing education, because nursing is informed by moral ends, and it is essential that professional nurses have a well developed ability for moral behaviour, ethical reasoning and decision making. The aim of this study was to construct a new instrument for measuring moral development according to Kohlberg's theory of moral development among students and professionals, and initially test it for reliability and validity among students in professional education. Thirty-two items following the conventional and postconventional stages in the theory were developed. Different actions for reducing the items were implemented. The final version of the instrument with 12 items was tested for reliability and validity among 326 conveniently chosen students. A Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.67 and support for construct validity was obtained.

The Moral Construct of Caring in Nursing as Communicative Action: the theory and practice of a caring science

This article presents an instrument and data testing a theory of the Moral Construct of Caring in Nursing as Communicative Action. Pilot testing involved 185 items administered to 82 nurses in 3 countries. The instrument includes 7 subscales addressing the nurse's personal and professional selves, the patient's personal and illness selves, the bidirectional interaction, the moral maturity of both, and the current state of nursing practice. Results suggest that the theory provides predictive control of the phenomena, drawing attention to the founding of evidence-based practice on practical, workable theory. Research continues, focusing on refining construct definitions and improving reliabilities.

War Exposure, Attachment Style, and Moral Reasoning

This study extends the investigation of the effects of war exposure beyond those previously documented (e.g., increased stress and aggression and various types of psychopathology) to include moral reasoning. Three groups from two cultures with different levels of exposure to the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo were compared using Rest's Defining Issues Test. Possible effects of attachment style alone and in interaction with war exposure were also investigated. The results showed that exposure to war has (a) a very strong negative effect on moral reasoning with (b) no moderation by attachment style. However, the evidence suggests that war exposure may change the individual's attachment style from secure to insecure by inducing a more negative model of the other.

What influences children's and adolescents' understanding of the complexity of the Internet?

This study aimed at analyzing complex relationships among Internet use, Internet users, and conceptual understanding of the Internet. It used path models to examine factors related to Internet use (duration of Internet use, frequency of Internet use, and informal Internet classes) and Internet users (age and gender) in affecting understanding of the technical and social complexity of the Internet for 322 elementary and middle school students. The findings of the study indicate that (a) age of young Internet users had predominant effects on both the technical and social understanding of the Internet; (b) frequency of Internet use and informal Internet classes had small but significant effects on social understanding, but no effect on technical understanding; and (c) technical understanding had a unidirectional effect on social understanding. The implications of these findings for the implementation of the Children's Internet Protection Act are discussed.

MORAL REASONING: THE INFLUENCE OF AFFECTIVE PERSONALITY, DILEMMA CONTENT AND GENDER

This study examined the influence of affective personality, perfectionism, gender, arousal and dilemma content on moral reasoning. 264 participants were presented with moral dilemmas to which they had to provide a solution that reflected various degrees of justice and care. The results indicated that a) affective personality had an effect on moral reasoning, b) female participants reported higher levels of care morality than did male participants, c) gender interacted with perfectionism in the production of moral standpoints, d) dilemma content exerted a strong effect on the participants' use of moral strategy. It was concluded that although moral reasoning appears to be governed primarily by the dilemma content at hand, an individual's moral solutions are influenced by gender and affective state.

A stage is a stage is a stage: a direct comparison of two scoring systems

L. Kohlberg (1969) argued that his moral stages captured a developmental sequence specific to the moral domain. To explore that contention, the author compared stage assignments obtained with the Standard Issue Scoring System (A. Colby & L. Kohlberg, 1987a, 1987b) and those obtained with a generalized content-independent stage-scoring system called the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System (T. L. Dawson, 2002a), on 637 moral judgment interviews (participants' ages ranged from 5 to 86 years). The correlation between stage scores produced with the 2 systems was .88. Although standard issue scoring and hierarchical complexity scoring often awarded different scores up to Kohlberg's Moral Stage 2/3, from his Moral Stage 3 onward, scores awarded with the two systems predominantly agreed. The author explores the implications for developmental research.

“ Good Education Is… ” The Development of Evaluative Thought Across the Life Span

The author uses a cognitive developmental approach to investigate educational conceptions, addressing the question, How does evaluative reasoning about education change over the course of cognitive development? The author conducted independent analyses of the developmental level and conceptual content of 246 interview performances of individuals aged 5 to 86 years. The developmental level of the interview performances was assessed with a content-general scoring system, the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System. A Rasch analysis of the results revealed 6 developmental levels and provided support for invariant sequence, developmental spurts and plateaus, and similar developmental patterns for childhood and adulthood levels. The results of the subsequent analysis of the propositional content of the same interview texts were used to produce qualitative descriptions of changes in evaluative reasoning about education across the 6 levels identified in the data. Finally, descriptions constructed in this way, although richer and less prone to reification, were shown to be conceptually analogous to the stage definitions produced by other cognitive developmental researchers. The implications of the method and findings are discussed.