A Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students: LAWRENCE KOHLBERG

By Gale and Cengage

Perfect for research assignments in psychology, science, and history, this concise study guide is a one-stop source for in-depth coverage of major psychological theories and the people who developed them. Consistently formatted entries typically cover the following: biographical sketch and personal data, theory outline, analysis of psychologist's place in history, summary of critical response to the theory, the theory in action, and more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jan 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535831611

Book preview

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BIOGRAPHY

Early years

Lawrence Kohlberg was born on October 25, 1927, in Bronxville, New York, an affluent suburb of New York City. His family was well-to-do. Kohlberg’s father, Alfred Kohlberg, was an importer of Asian merchandise, while his mother, Charlotte Albrecht, was an amateur chemist. She was his father’s second wife. Kohlberg was the youngest of four children; he had two older sisters and one older brother. His parents separated while Kohlberg was still a child. The family’s religious background was Jewish, which influenced Kohlberg’s later emphasis on justice as well as his commitment to putting his theories into practice.

Kohlberg completed his secondary education at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a private boarding school. Although the school has always been known for its rigorous academic standards, Kohlberg was not particularly interested in intellectual matters during his high school years. A recent appreciation of his life noted that his classmates remembered him far more for his sense of mischief and forays to nearby girls’ schools than for his interest in academic theories. Kohlberg was placed on probation at one point for violating the school’s regulations. He later recalled that he had tried to compete in that regard with the school’s most famous alumnus—Humphrey Bogart—who had been expelled from Phillips Academy for disciplinary reasons. Kohlberg added that if anyone had predicted at that time that he would specialize in moral education, he would not have believed them.

Kohlberg graduated from Phillips in 1945, but he did not go on to college until the fall of 1948. Although he was too young to serve in the armed forces, he became committed to Zionism—the establishment of the state of Israel. After World War II ended in August 1945 with the surrender of Japan, Kohlberg took advantage of the end of hostilities to go to Europe, where he interviewed survivors of the Holocaust. He then joined the merchant marine and served as second engineer on a South American freighter. The connection between this employment and the Zionist cause was that the freighter smuggled European Jews into Palestine past the British blockade. Kohlberg’s participation in this smuggling was a dangerous activity in the late 1940s, as it was considered an international crime. He maintained a well-developed sense of humor, however; he recalled with glee in later years that he and his shipmates fooled government inspectors by telling them that the ship’s improvised beds for its passengers were really containers for storing bananas. When the freighter’s true operation was discovered, Kohlberg was arrested and imprisoned for a time in a British internment camp on the island of Cyprus. After his release, he lived as a refugee on an Israeli kibbutz, or agricultural collective. His experience led him to ponder the moral dimensions of disobeying authority, a question he phrased to himself as When is it permissible to be involved with violent means for supposedly just ends? Kohlberg eventually returned to Israel in 1969 to study the moral development of young people living in a left-wing kibbutz. This visit proved to be a critical turning point in his later professional career.

Kohlberg returned to the United States in 1948 and applied for entrance to the University of Chicago. His scores on the admissions examinations were so high that he was exempted from most of the university’s course requirements. As a result, he was able to complete his bachelor’s degree in one year. Although his first interest had been philosophy, he remained at Chicago to do graduate work in psychology. Kohlberg’s explorations of such philosophers as Plato, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey did, however, exert an ongoing influence on his thinking about moral education.

Doctoral research and early teaching career

Kohlberg had the good fortune to study under some of the most outstanding American psychologists of the 1950s during his graduate school years, including such well-regarded researchers as Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990), Robert Havighurst (1900–1991), Carl Rogers (1902–1987), and Anselm Strauss (1916–1996). When Kohlberg began his graduate work, he initially assumed he would become a clinical psychologist rather than a researcher, but he was captivated by the writings of the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980)—particularly Piaget’s account of the moral development of children. Piaget maintained that children’s processes of moral reasoning changed as they grew older. In 1955 Kohlberg began a research project for his doctoral dissertation that involved interviewing 72 male children and adolescents about moral issues. Kohlberg used the now-famous dilemma of Heinz, reprinted in the accompanying sidebar, to draw out his subjects’ patterns of moral reasoning, as well as to elicit their specific answers to the dilemma. Kohlberg discerned six stages of moral development, divided into three levels, in the material that he outlined in his dissertation. These stages ranged from a preconventional stage, characterized by self-interest, to higher stages associated with subscription to conventional moral standards for the good of society, as well as a specific stage that Kohlberg defined as postconventional morality. Kohlberg identified postconventional morality with moral reasoning based on the principles underlying ethical rules and norms, rather than on uniform applications of rules. When the dissertation was published in 1958, Kohlberg received his choice of job offers from several prestigious institutions.

PRINCIPAL PUBLICATIONS

Essays on Moral Development. Vol. 1, The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.

Essays on Moral Development. Vol. 2, The Psychology of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.

With Anne Colby. The Measurement of Moral Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

With F. C. Power and Ann Higgins. Lawrence Kohlberg’s Approach to Moral Education. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

FURTHER ANALYSIS:

The Case of Heinz

The first version of Heinz’ dilemma that is given here is taken from Continuities in Childhood and Adult Moral Development Revisited, a chapter that Kohlberg contributed in 1973

Reviews for A Study Guide for Psychologists and Their Theories for Students

[Paul · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good, concise overview of Kohlberg's life, theories and critics. Rather like an extended encyclopedia entry.