Kohlberg was fascinated by Piaget's work on moral development in children. His 1963 doctoral thesis outlined six stages of moral development and aimed to find evidence of progression through these stages. The study involved 58 boys aged 7-16 from Chicago who were given moral dilemmas to solve in interviews over several years. Younger boys tended to reason at earlier stages while older boys used later stage reasoning, providing support for Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development. While the methodology has been criticized, later studies found criminals committing financially-motivated crimes displayed more immature moral reasoning than violent criminals.

1. KohlbergMoral development in childrenRevision... Cognition....

2. Kohlberg was fascinated by Piaget’s work on the moral development of children. His doctoral thesis (Kohlberg 1963) has become the foundation for a major theory in psychology where he outlines six stages of moral development.

4. Aim... To find evidence in support of progression through stages of moral development. Participants... The study took place in 1963 and was based on 58 boys from Chicago. They were from Working and middle class. Aged 7, 10, 13 and 16.

5. Methodology... Each boy was given a 2 hour interview with 10 different dilemmas that they had to solve. (The most famous was HEINZ dilemma). Some of the boys were followed up at 3-yearly intervals up to age 30-36. This makes this a longitudinal study.

6. Heinz dilemma... In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to make. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug-for his wife. Should the husband have done that?

7. Results... Younger boys tended to perform at stages 1 and 2 with older boys at 3 and 4 suggesting support for development through stages. These patterns were consistent in the cross-cultural studies, although progression was slower in the industrialised societies. No support was found for stage 6 in this sample and in 1978 Kohlberg revised his review his view and agreed there might not be a separate stage 6.

8. Conclusions... There does seem to be support across cultures for the stage theory. There methodology has been heavily criticised, but more recent replications (Thornton and Reid 1982) with criminal samples have suggested that criminals committing crime for financial gain show more immature reasoning than those committing violent crimes, suggesting that Kohlberg's stages can be applied to types of criminality.

9. Ta Dah!