Moral development: The views of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg

Drawing heavily on his theory of cognitive development, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget observed children’s interactions and behaviors while playing games. Based on his observations, he expressed the belief that children progress through two stages of moral development. First, preschoolers show unilateral respect for authority and rules. Over time, school-age children learn and adapt to cooperation through interaction with their peers and the development of mutual respect. Children learn that rules can be flexible and can be modified by reaching mutual agreement with others.

The views of Lawrence Kohlberg

Based on Piaget’s work, the American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg observed that the development of morality goes through six successive and unchanging stages. Kohlberg grouped his six stages into three levels: pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional. At the pre-conventional level, children are self-centered and make decisions based on their desire to avoid negative consequences. For example, a young girl will avoid hitting another child during recess because she does not want to get into trouble with her teacher. When children enter the conventional stage, they make moral decisions based on social norms. At this level, a baseball player on the second base will not throw the ball with force when he marks the runner because it is not nice to hit others and he would not want to be hit that way. Individuals who reach the most mature level, the post-conventional, make decisions based on universal principles and justice for all. In hockey, for example, bodychecking (a defensive move where one player tries to separate the disc from the other by putting his upper body “forward”) is within the rules of the game, but can lead to serious injury. A young hockey player contemplating on a post-conventional level would decide not to make the opponent lose his balance and fall on the ice because it could endanger that player’s safety and violate the ‘spirit of the game’. According to Kohlberg (1969), individuals progress through these three levels of moral reasoning as they learn to incorporate and apply the principles of justice effectively to moral dilemmas. Kohlberg believed that a person’s social environment and experiences play a central role in achieving higher levels of moral reasoning. For example, teachers and parents can encourage the moral development of young people through discussions about moral issues, in which different opinions will be heard on the same subject. Source: “Human Motor Development” -A Lifespan approach (Greg Payne, Larry Isaacs) Recent Articles