The Story of Psychology (75 page)

A few salient findings:

Developmentalists see a pattern in the data. Altruistic behavior seems to form in a series of fairly distinct stages, but there is no general agreement on how many there are or what they are. In one view there are four, in another five, and a six-stage model has been proposed by the longtime altruism expert Dennis L. Krebs and a colleague, Frank Van Hesteren, of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby,
B.C.
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Krebs and Van Hesteren’s six stages are based on (1) obedience to the rules of authorities and the need for personal security and safety, (2) the maximizing of personal gain and quid pro quo decisions, (3) conformity to role and group expectations, and reciprocity and cooperation, (4) a sense of social responsibility, and behaving in accord with internalized values, (5) upholding the rights of other individuals and a willingness to make a sacrifice to benefit another, and (6) the upholding of universal moral values and identification with all humanity.

Moral development:
Altruism is only one outcome of the development of the moral sense. Interest in that aspect of psychological development began in 1908, when the distinguished English psychologist William McDougall sketched a theory of the development of the moral sense based on his general knowledge of human psychology. In the 1920s Piaget began empirical investigation of the subject by observing children playing games and by telling them stories of little transgressions and asking their views of the proper punishment. (An example: In the first case, a boy fills his father’s inkwell to be helpful but makes an inkblot on the tablecloth. In the second, a boy plays with his father’s inkwell and makes an inkblot on the tablecloth. Should the punishment be the same in each case?)

Piaget concluded that moral behavior, within the context of game playing, develops between the ages of four and twelve, in three stages, changing from unquestioning acceptance of the rules handed down by parents or older children to a recognition that rules are made by people and can be changed by mutual agreement. Similarly, the basis on which an act (such as the spilling of ink) is judged right or wrong changes from the damage done to the individual’s intentions.
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Piaget’s
Moral Judgment of the Child
, appearing in English in 1932, inspired a rash of studies of moral development in America, but most were little more than tinkering and nitpicking. The next major advance,
a landmark in the study of moral development, came three decades later and was the work of Lawrence Kohlberg of Harvard. He conceived a new method of measuring moral development and over a twenty-five-year span revised it, collected and analyzed data, and propounded a six-stage theory of moral development that became the classic in the field and the model that all others, ever since, have either emulated, modified, or reacted against.

Kohlberg would have made a good clergyman had he not found his calling as a moral-development psychologist. Earnest and thoughtful, warm and gently humorous, talkative and impassioned, he was profoundly concerned about ethical questions and the moral life. Indifferent to externals, he was the very archetype of the intellectual professor, his clothes baggy and rumpled, his hair disheveled, his briefcase badly scuffed and overfull, his glasses shoved up on his forehead and forgotten there.

The son of a well-to-do businessman, Kohlberg was born in 1927 in Bronxville, an affluent suburb of New York.
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He attended the Phillips Academy in Andover and graduated as World War II ended. Then, instead of proceeding to college, he was driven by his conscience to become a merchant mariner so as to join a project that was smuggling shiploads of refugee European Jews through a British blockade into Palestine. The experience gave Kohlberg a lifelong interest in the question of when one is morally justified in disobeying the law and legitimate authority. It also gave him a lifelong disease: he was captured and briefly interned in a camp in Cyprus from which he soon escaped, but not before acquiring a parasitic intestinal infection that intermittently ravaged him throughout his life.

Kohlberg took his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Chicago; psychology and philosophy (particularly ethics) were his twin passions. He read and admired Piaget’s
Moral Judgment of the Child
, but in the spirit of American psychology felt that a sound theory of moral development should be based on data gathered by objective methods rather than Piaget’s naturalistic observations. For his doctoral dissertation, therefore, he created a rating system (he later made it into a test) that he modified and used for the rest of his life and from which he derived his cognitive-developmental theory of the stages of moral development. The test consists of nine moral dilemmas, which the researcher presents, one at a time, to a subject. Each is followed by an interview comprising a long series of questions about what the subject considers the right and wrong thing to do in the case.

An example (the “Heinz dilemma”): In a European town, a woman is near death from a special kind of cancer; a new drug, discovered by a druggist in the town, might save her, but he is a profiteer and charges ten times what it costs him to make the medicine. Heinz, the woman’s husband, can borrow only half the amount and pleads with the druggist to cut his price, but the druggist refuses. Heinz thinks about breaking in and stealing the drug to save his wife’s life. Should he? Why or why not? Does he have a duty or obligation to steal the drug? Should he steal the drug for his wife if he doesn’t love her? What if the person dying were a stranger—should Heinz steal the drug for him? It is against the law to steal; does that make it morally wrong? And so on, for a total of twenty-one questions.
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Kohlberg’s original sample consisted of a cross-section of seventy-two Chicago-area males aged ten, thirteen, and sixteen, whom he tested every two to five years for the next three decades. After the initial testing, the differences in the answers given by the three age groups suggested to Kohlberg that the moral sense develops in distinct stages. Later, when his subjects were all older, he found them advancing through those stages much as he had expected them to. Here, in abbreviated form, and with a simplification of some of Kohlberg’s difficult wording, are the stages of the theory and typical responses at each stage both in favor of and against Heinz’s stealing the drug:

Kohlberg had many devoted followers and admirers, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, when his emphasis on justice and his elevation of Stage 6 decision making over the law made him a favorite with civil
rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and women’s liberationists. But his test and theory have been attacked by many developmentalists on a number of grounds. Some say there is evidence that development is not always upward and sequential (some individuals skip stages in their development, others regress). Some say that moral thinking doesn’t necessarily lead to moral behavior and that individuals often rank higher on the Kohlberg scale than their behavior warrants.
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(Kohlberg insisted that most studies show a correlation between the stage of moral judgment and the actual behavior.) Carol Gilligan, an associate of Kohlberg’s at Harvard, charged that his scale is biased in favor of men: women are likely to respond to moral dilemmas through caring and personal relationships, men by calling on abstract concepts like justice and equity; women therefore score lower on the Kohlberg scale, as if they were less morally developed than men.
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Kohlberg stoically endured these and other criticisms and assaults, some of which he agreed with (and changed his scoring accordingly), and some of which he quietly rebutted with new data and arguments. He also suffered the failure of two dreams he had devoted much time and energy to. One was a pilot project to raise the moral thinking of prisoners to Stage 4 through discussions of moral dilemmas, the other an attempt to do much the same thing with troubled teenagers. (The results were encouraging, but the project failed to spread beyond a few schools in Cambridge and New York.)

Added to these strains and disappointments was a severe recurrence of his chronic parasitic infection, causing him racking stomach and intestinal pain. Kohlberg, nearing sixty, became deeply depressed. He had discussed the moral dilemma of suicide with a close friend, to whom he said that if one had important responsibilities to others, one ought to go on. But the battle became too much for him. On January 17, 1987, his car was found parked beside a tidal marsh of Boston Harbor, and three months later his body washed up at Logan Airport. In a loving memorial tribute in the
Harvard Gazette
of December 15, 1989, three eminent psychologists (Carol Gilligan was one of them) summed up his contribution: “[Larry] almost single-handedly established moral development as a central concern of developmental psychology.” He would have been gratified to hear that; what would have gratified him even more was that by the late 1990s, well over a hundred cross-cultural studies had confirmed that the development of moral reasoning in the stages set forth by Kohlberg does appear to be a cultural universal.
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