Cognitive approaches to moral development

If we are concerned with young people and how they interact with their communities, we must be interested in the pscyho-social factors that influence children and adolescents to act the way they do. On this occasion, I am interested in "moral development"; that is, what are the prevailing theories regarding moral (and to some extent, social) development? Moreover, why should we care?

The foundational theory of moral development belongs to Jean Piaget, who posited that there are cognitive structures that develop in late childhood and early adolescence which are linked to stages of development of moral reasoning in young people (1965). Piaget constructed a set of "moral experiments" to test attitudes and behaviors in young children and the differences in slightly older children. He found that young children tend to understand and conceptualize morality in terms of obedience to authority figures (adults) whereas older children think about morality in terms of peer groups. Older children, he observed, displayed a sense of reciprocity and empathy, due possibly to the fact that their social environments consisted primarily of interactions within an "egalitarian" peer group.

Lawrence Kohlberg (1971, 1976, 1978) used this notion of the relationship between cognitive structural development and moral understanding/behavior to argue that there are a defined number of cognitive structures, that develop in a series, that are tied to conceptions of "justice" in adolescents. Moreover, he claimed (convincingly to many) that these stages are universal across different societies.

This is by no means an exhaustive view of theories of moral development, but it is important to note the influence of Piaget and Kohlberg on current understandings of child social and emotional development. The notion of "service-learning" embodies this Kohlbergian constructivist-psychological framework (whether consciously or not). That is, service-learning, as a pedagogical approach, assumes that conceptions of justice and reciprocity are developing at a certain stage (K-12) and those conceptions may be enhanced through exposure to diverse environments. In fact, Kohlberg's theory applied in the educational context relies heavily on John Dewey's ideas of experiential education.

I would argue that this is precisely why we should care about the prevailing psycho-social view of "moral development": because this view is informing how children are educated in public schools. I will be exploring challenges to Kohlberg's theories in terms of actual pro-social behavior on the part of adolescents in a post later this week. For more on cognitive approaches to moral development see Colby, A. & Kohlberg, L. (1987) The measurement of moral judgment. Volume 1: Theoretical foundations and research validation.