Kohlberg's Test Research Articles

Interpersonal Moral Conflicts Between Couples: Effects of Type of Dilemma, Role, and Partner's Judgments on Level of Moral Reasoning and Probability of Resolution

Forty-two male–female couples completed Kohlberg's test of moral development and made moral judgments about the most recent interpersonal moral conflict they had experienced in their everyday lives. Participants made lower stage moral judgments about their interpersonal moral conflicts than about the dilemmas on Kohlberg's test. The type of interpersonal moral conflict participants experienced and their role in the conflict were related to the types of moral judgments they made. Participants who reported philosophical conflicts made more mature moral judgments than participants who reported antisocial conflicts, especially if their role in the antisocial conflict was that of a transgressor. Conflicts were most likely to be resolved when partners' moral judgments about their conflict were similar in moral maturity. The implications of these findings for models of moral judgment are discussed.

Judging Yourself as You Judge Others: Moral Development and Exculpation

This study investigated two main issues: Whether people's judgments about real-life moral transgressions are affected by the role they play in them and whether self-serving biases in such judgments vary with level of moral development. One-hundred twenty university students took Colby and Kohlberg's (1987) test of moral judgment and made open-ended and rating-scale judgments about three real-life transgressions they considered moral in nature. As expected, participants made more exculpatory judgments about transgressions they committed than they did about transgressions others committed, but participants did not judge transgressions committed against them more harshly than they judged transgressions committed against others. The higher participants scored on Kohlberg's test the less they externalized and excused their moral transgressions. Contrary to expectation, this relation also applied to moral judgments about transgressions committed by others against others. These findings have important implications for models of moral development and social cognition.

The Forms and Functions of Real‐life Moral Decision‐making

People rarely make the types of moral judgement evoked by Kohlberg's test when they make moral decisions in their everyday lives. The anticipated consequences of real‐life moral decisions, to self and to others, may influence moral choices and the structure of moral reasoning. To understand real‐life moral judgement we must attend to its functions, which, although they occasionally involve resolving hypothetical moral dilemmas like those on Kohlberg's test, more often involve promoting good social relations, upholding favourable self‐concepts and justifying self‐interested behaviour. We argue that a functional model of moral judgement and moral behaviour derived from evolutionary theory may supply a better account of real‐life morality than the Kohlbergian model.

Gender and dilemma differences in real-life moral judgment.

The authors investigated the effects of gender, gender role, and type of moral dilemma on moral maturity and moral orientation. Fifty-five female and 55 male university students were given the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (J. T. Spence & R. L. Helmreich, 1978), L. Kohlberg's test of moral judgm

Variations in Level of Moral Judgment as a Function of Type of Dilemma and Moral Choice

ABSTRACTThis study compares the predictive power of two models of moral judgment: (a) Kohlberg's model, which predicts stage consistency across varying content, and (b) a model that predicts variations in stage as a function of complex interactions between people and social contexts. Forty university students were asked to make and justify choices on three moral dilemmas—a dilemma involving the sale of defective merchandise (selling dilemma) and two dilemmas from Kohlberg's test of moral judgment. Half the participants made hypothetical choices on the selling dilemma; the other half were offered a selfish incentive—money—for concealing the defects in the merchandise. In support of the interactional model, (a) participants scored lower on the selling dilemma than on Kohlberg's test, (b) the monetary incentive affected moral choices, (c) participants justified the choice to conceal defects in the merchandise with significantly lower stage moral judgments than they invoked in support of the decision to disclose its defects, and (d) participants who upheld the choice to disclose supported it with higher stage justifications than those who rejected it. Surprisingly, however, participants who stood to make money disclosed more about the defects in the article and charged less than participants who did not.

Gender and Perspective Differences in Moral Judgement and Moral Orientation

Abstract Forty male and female adults responded to two forms of Kohlberg's test‐‐one in the standard third‐person form, and the other imagining themselves as the protagonists in Kohlberg's dilemmas. Females obtained slightly lower moral maturity scores than males across both forms, but there were no sex differences in moral orientation. There were no significant effects for the perspective from which Kohlberg's test was taken, on either moral maturity or moral orientation. Care‐oriented moral judgements were more prevalent in dilemmas involving life vs. law conflicts than in dilemmas involving conscience vs. punishment conflicts. Subjects did not consistently make either care‐ or justice‐oriented moral judgements. There was a significant negative correlation between the frequency of care‐oriented judgements and moral maturity for males, but not for females. Although these results are partially consistent with the possibility that Kohlberg's test and scoring system are biased against females, they do not support the assumption that females make more care‐oriented moral judgements than males on Kohlberg's test, or, indeed, that members of either sex display enough consistency in care‐and justice‐based moral judgements on Kohlberg's test for such judgements to serve as the basis of moral orientations.

The Structural Consistency of Moral Judgments About AIDS

This study compared the structure (i.e., stage) of moral judgments to dilemmas involving AIDS to the structure of moral judgment on Kohlberg's test to determine whether attitudes and opinions about AIDS affect level of moral judgment. Subjects included 40 men, who responded to (a) two standard dilemmas from Colby and Kohlberg's (1987) test of moral judgment, (b) two of Kohlberg's dilemmas ammended to involve AIDS, (c) a set of AIDS dilemmas derived from incidents reported in the media, (d) a set of questions tapping attitudes toward people with AIDS, and (e) Rubin and Peplau's (1975) just-world scale. Moral judgment was structurally consistent across the three sets of dilemmas, and only weakly related to attitudes towards AIDS and belief in a just world. Moral choices did not covary with moral stage. These results are consistent with Kohlberg's contention that moral judgment is organized in "structures of the whole."

Situational variation in moral judgment: In a stage or on a stage?

Two issues were examined in this study-the consistency of moral judgment across different types of dilemma and different social contexts, and the relationship between the structure (stage) of moral judgment and the content of moral decisions. Forty subjects were given two hypothetical dilemmas about business decisions and two standard Kohlberg dilemmas. Half the subjects directed their responses to a business audience, half to a philosophical audience. Responses to the moral dilemmas were scored in accordance with the Colby and Kohlberg (1987) scoring manual. Stage of moral reasoning was found to be significantly higher on the Kohlberg dilemmas than on the business dilemmas. A significant interaction between type of dilemma and audience was attributed to the tendency of subjects directing their responses to a business audience to interpret one of the business dilemmas in terms of the moral order of business, but for subjects directing their responses to a philosophy audience to treat it as a philosophical dilemma. The other business dilemma evoked uniformly low-level moral judgments. The amount of selfishness intrinsic in subjects' moral choices on the business dilemmas was significantly negatively correlated with moral maturity on the business dilemmas, but not with their moral maturity on Kohlberg's test. These results are interpreted as more consistent with models of moral development such as those advanced by C. G. Levine ([1979] "Stage Acquisition and Stage Use: An Appraisal of Stage Displacement Explanations of Variation in Moral Reasoning, " Human Development, Vol. 22, pp. 145-164), J. Rest ([1983] "Morality," in: P. H. Mussen [ed.], J. H. Flavell and E. Markman [Vol. eds.], Handbook of Child Psychology [Vol. 3, 4th ed.], John Wiley & Sons, New York), and R. Harré ([1984]) Personal Being: A Theory for Individual Psychology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts), which posit a relatively wide range of within-person stage use and emphasize the determining power of social situations, than with the more constructivistic model of moral development of Colby and Kohlberg (1987).

Moral Judgment and Behaviour at School

The relationship of moral judgments, behaviour at school, and helping behaviour was studied by testing 215 children, aged 9 to 10 (3rd graders) and 11 to 12 (5th graders), as subjects. Behaviour at school was measured on the basis of conduct grades and appraisals of good and poor behaviour administered by teachers. Helping behaviour was measured by peer ratings while moral judgments were measured by Kohlberg's test. The concept of a positive relationship between moral judgments and school behaviour was strengthened in groups according to sex and grade. Girls in Grade 5 were an exception. Apparently prepuberty emphasized such facets of the girls' behaviour as lack of responsibility, disinterest in cooperation, unfriendliness, and opposition. The lower the level of moral judgments the more conduct problems may occur.

A Comparison of Piaget's and Kohlberg's Theories and Tests for Moral Judgment

Abstract:R⊘rvik, H. 1980. A Comparison of Piaget's and Kohlberg's Theories and Tests for Moral Judgment. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 25,99‐124. Piaget's and Kohlberg's theories for moral judgment are compared. On the basis of this comparison, hypotheses are formulated regarding expected relationships between the tests constructed on the basis of the two theories. The empirical testing of these hypotheses indicates that there are marked similarities between Piaget's and Kohlberg's tests as to characteristics measured, power of discrimination between age levels, and in the stage placement of subjects. The main differences between the tests seem to be that Piaget's test is most influenced by the personal relationship to other persons. Contrary to the impression given by the theorist himself, Kohlberg's test seems to a larger extent to measure the subjects’ norms and emotional reactions connected to inter‐nalization of norms. Moral behavior is more closely related to Kohlberg's measure.

Content and Form in Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development

Abstract: R⊘rvik, H. 1980. Content and Form in Kohlberg's Theory of Moral Development. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 24,105‐120. One of the fundamental premises in Kohlberg's theory of moral development is the possibility of discerning between form and content, and he maintains that his test measures aspects of form alone. The present article reports on an empirical investigation of that allegation. The results of this study indicate that this part of Kohlberg's theory lacks support in the data. Thus, when teachers study groups of pupils’ answers from the Kohlberg's test, they recognize norms that the school intentionally transmits to pupils. Grading of this norm content and of motivation for choice of norm in moral decisions shows clear relations to grading advocated in connection with Kohlberg's test on moral judgment.

Moral Judgment Research and the Cognitive‐Developmental Approach to Moral Education

Describing Kohlberg's interview test and his own Defining Issues Test (DIT), Rest assures us that we now have usable, reliable ways of assessing an individual's moral judgment development level. There is evidence for accepting a developmental sequence in moral judgment, from low stage thinking to higher stage thinking. Rest reviews the evidence for three aspects of morality as part of the cognitive domain, although numerous other factors beyond moral judgment influence concrete behavior. The author offers impressions about educational interventions. Moral judgment theory is considered the current best choice for “theoretical richness, practical implications, validated findings.”

Construct Validity of the Sentence Completion Test of Ego Development

Evidence for the construct validity of the Sen tence Completion Test of Ego Development (SCT), some of it previously unpublished, is reviewed. The substantive component is substantiated both by in tuitive plausibility and by the fact that rating skill can be communicated through written instructions. Internal consistency is shown by alpha coefficients of about .85. Evidence for sequentiality is provided by studies showing cross-sectional gains with age during adolescence, similar profiles of item scores for adjacent total protocol ratings, substantial cor relations over long time spans, gains proportional to retest intervals during adolescence, gains follow ing theory-relevant interventions of several months' length, and better comprehension of lower than of higher stages. The SCT has substantial correlation with tests of related conceptions, such as Kohl berg's test of moral maturity, and with measures of ego level applied to other behavior samples. Cor relations with isolated traits characteristic of spe cific stages range from negligible to positive. Studies of external validity in general yield positive results, though theory does not sharply define what results should be considered positive. At lower ego levels there is behavioral evidence confirming the syndromes; at higher levels differential evidence lies in attitudes and ideas. Overall, the test has ade quate validity for research purposes when ad ministered and scored with sufficient care, but not for individual diagnosis unsupported by other data. Evidence for construct validity is substantial, but falls short of clear proof of sequentiality.

The Reliability and Validity of Objective Indices of Moral Development

The present paper addresses three issues sur rounding Rest's Defining Issues Test, an objective test of moral development based on Kohlberg's six- stage theory of moral development. Those issues are (1) the stability of test scores over time; (2) correla tion of scores with Kohlberg's interview measure of moral development; and (3) the insensitivity of its scoring procedure, which ignores responses to all items keyed to lower stages. In two age heterogene ous samples, total score test-retest reliabilities were generally in the high .70's or low .80's, regardless of which of several scoring schemes was used. In another age heterogeneous sample, the correlation with scores on Kohlberg's test was .70; but in two age homogeneous samples, the correlations were about .35 and .20. These validity coefficients sug gest that (1) the common variance shared by Rest's and Kohlberg's tests in age heterogeneous samples can be attributed to the fact that scores on both tests increase with age and (2) the two tests cannot be considered equivalent measures of the same con struct differing only in format. Results also in dicated that an empirically weighted scoring scheme is more sensitive to longitudinal change than is Rest's P score. This sensitivity to longi tudinal trends is an important property for tests such as Rest's which claim to be developmental and are frequently used to assess educational change. The empirically weighted sum had a significantly higher test-retest reliability (p < .05) than did a simple sum of item responses, and it had a signifi cantly higher correlation with Kohlberg's measure than did a theoretically weighted sum.

Internality vs Externality and Personal Adjustment: A Factor Analytic Study

This study compared three tests to determine the degree to which they might be measuring a single construct: Rotter's Internal-External Reinforcement Scale, Rest's adaptation of Kohlberg's test of moral development, and selected scales from Shostrom's Personal Orientation Inventory. All three scales were expected to show positive relationships with a measure of personal adjustment, the Tennessee Self-concept Scale. Numerous significant correlations were found among these instruments, suggesting some commonality in the personality dimensions being measured. There were enough differences to suggest continued refinement and to mitigate against substitution of one test for another without loss of information.

A Developmental Approach to Assessment of Moral Education Programmes: A Short Commentary

Abstract: The authors report an empirical study, evaluating the effectiveness of a moral education programme in schools. The control and experimental groups were measured before and after on Kohlberg's test of moral dilemmas. The experimental group had a period of work on value issues whereas the control group did not The results showed that the experimental group had progressed further in moral development, as measured by Kohlberg's test, than the control group.