Nancy Mellucci said:
Perhaps Kohlberg retains some utility as an example of the progression of reasoning skills. It has virtually no utility in terms of predicting whether or not people will do the right thing.Well, Nancy, you have flushed me out from my sabbatical hole. Actually a more accurate way to say it would be that Kohlberg's stage model (measured by the interview or by the DIT) has only a small correlation with the moral action tasks that have been measured. For instance, the correlation with disobedience in the Milgram study was about .2 (as I remember). Not impressive, but not zero. Blasi gives a good review of this problem in:
Blasi, A. (1980) Bridging Moral Cognition and Moral Action: A Critical Review of the Literature. Psychological Bulletin, 88(1): 1-45.
And this is already a very old reference. BTW, no one seems to be able to replicate Gilligan's claims in the 1980s about gender difference in reasoning either.
Most folks I know who are doing research in moral reasoning these days are not using Kohlberg (or Gilligan), but there seems to be no agreed upon replacement for his grand theory. This is the way of all grand theories. So, I would not be surprised to see Kohlberg still lead in texts until something comes through that can pull all the disparate work together. A good recent piece is by Jon Haidt in Psych Review called "The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail." This can be found at:
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/haidt.emotionaldog.pdf
But this paper gives little reference to the large developmental literature in the area (also mostly post-Kohlberg, or at least neo-Kohlberg). I do not know of a good review of the developmental work except for a recent Handbook of Development chapter by Turiel (and being in the UK without my files, I can't find it easily).
So, the wrap is: we are definitely post-Kohlberg, but no overarching paradigm is taking hold yet. It is actually a pretty exciting time. This might be a good thing to write about in text books, so students can see why a theory gets superceded and how we try to build new ones based on data.
Perhaps Dave Myers is listening and can rectify this in the next edition? Anybody else?
-Chuck
--
- Chuck Huff http://www.stolaf.edu/people/huff/
- Professor of Psychology St. Olaf College
- CURRENTLY ON SABBATICAL AT:
- Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering
- Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility
- DeMontfort University
- Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK Phone: +44 0116 250 6294
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