Briefly describe Kohlberg's stages of moral development, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Kohlberg's theory
What will be an ideal response?
Lawrence Kohlberg devised a stage theory of moral development based on subjects' responses to presented moral dilemmas. Kohlberg was interested in a person's reasoning, not necessarily his or her answer.
He theorized that people progress through a series of three levels of moral development ? preconventional, conventional, and postconventional. Each stage represents a different way of thinking about right and wrong. Preconventional thinkers think in terms of external authority, where acts are deemed wrong because they are punished; conventional thinkers think in terms of maintaining social order, rules are absolute, and they follow rules to win approval from others; and postconventional thinkers think in terms of a personal code of ethics.
Kolhberg's theory has received some support. Studies show that children generally do progress through his stages of moral reasoning in the order he proposed. However,it is not unusual to find that a person shows signs of several adjacent levels of moral reasoning. Furthermore, Kohlberg's model is much more culture-specific than he realized—focusing on individualistic ideas and interpersonal conflicts.
You might also like to view...
Data reduction is
a. recording data onto individual data sheets b. transcribing data from individual data sheets to a summary form c. performing statistical analysis d. All of these are true.
Research on the link between autism and intelligence has shown that autism negatively affects:
A) fluid intelligence more than it does crystallized intelligence. B) crystallized intelligence more than it does fluid intelligence. C) fluid and crystallized intelligence equally. D) fluid intelligence but enhances crystallized intelligence.
Open-ended questions in a survey:
a. provide researchers with information that they had not considered before. b. provide quantitative data. c. impose the researchers' point of view on a survey. d. all of these
In cell cultures, abnormal prions a. "hijack" DNA in order to produce more abnormal prions
b. convert normal prions into the abnormal form. c. increase calcium influx, which triggers apoptosis. d. enhance the expression of death genes that produce caspases.