Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1978
Moral Structure and Moral Content: Their Relationship to Personality Paul F. Dell 1,3 and Gregory J. Jurkovie 2
Received March 22, 1977
The relationship between personality as embodied in the moral content o f the Survey o f Ethical Attitudes (SEA) and moral structure as measured by the Kohlberg Moral Judgment Interview (MJI) was investigated using 99 male college students. No relationship was found between scores on the SEA and Moral Maturity Scores on the MJI, although this finding was qualified by the fact that the MJ1 Scores for most students were restricted to Kohlberg's conventional range o f morality. However, SEA scores were significantly correlated with the Moral Orientation scores obtained from the MJI. In contrast to scores on the SEA, scores on the MJ1 were significantly related to age. The problem o f confusing content and structure in moral development research was explored. The theoretical implications o f a personality component being involved in choice o f moral orientation were discussed as well.
INTRODUCTION The relationship between personality and moral development during adolescence and early adulthood has become the topic o f increased analysis in recent years. Yet studies in this area have often obscured or ignored important This research was partly supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-16899).
a Instructor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Texas Medical Branch. Major interests are in the area of moral development and family theories of psychopathology. 2Department of Psychiatry, Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts. Received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Major interests are sociocognitive development of children and clinical child psychology. 3 All correspondence should be addressed to Paul F. Dell, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas 77550. 63 0047-2891/78/0300-0063 $05.00/0 9 1978 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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differences between the content of moral attitudes and the structure of the reasoning supporting these attitudes. Individuals may endorse the same ideological beliefs and values (content) for reasons that qualitatively differ in conceptual style (structure). Because of problems in distinguishing moral content from structure, the precise nature of the relation of personality factors to moral development remains unclear. Hogan (1970) has studied the relationship of moral content to personality. Using the 35.item Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA), Hogan has investigated the disposition of an individual to adopt the ethics of personal conscience or the ethics of social responsibility. According to the ethics of personal conscience, there exists higher laws, unrelated to human legislation, which one can discover by intuition or reason (Hogan, 1970). The ethics of social responsibility assert that there is no such thing as a "higher law," and that "the most defensible criteria for evaluating social action are the existing legal system and the general welfare of society" (Hogan, 1970, p. 206). Hogan's basic thesis is that one's moral position is an integral part of one's personality structure. Hogan (1970) found that the ethics of personal conscience were correlated with low scores on the California F Scale. Examining the pattern of correlations of the SEA with the California Psychological Inventory, he found personal conscience subjects to be independent and innovative, as well as opportunistic, irresponsible, and given to rash behavior. Similarly, on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1962), Hogan found these subjects to be individualistic, enthusiastic innovators who had faith in intuition. Finally, these subjects were found to doubt the efficacy of legislated laws as a means for promoting human welfare, and to believe that institutions are the source of human injustice (Hogan and Dickstein, 1972). High scores on the SEA (ethics of social responsibility) had high scores on the California F Scale (Hogan, 1970). On the California Psychological Inventory, social responsibility subjects appeared well socialized and even-tempered, but also unoriginal and perhaps inclined to resist social change (Hogan, 1970). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator showed these subjects to be diligent, systematic workers who are counterintuitive and prefer everything to remain on a factual basis (Hogan, 1970). Finally, subjects with an ethic of social responsibility were found to have faith in the instrumental value of the law and to believe that injustice results from the actions of individuals (Hogan and Dickstein, 1972). In a similar vein, studies relating Kohlberg's moral stages or structures to various measures of personality have been reported. The California F Scale (Kohlberg, 1964), various scales on the Omnibus Personality Inventory (Sullivan and Quarter, 1972), an adjective Q-sort of perceived and ideal selves (Haan et al., 1968), Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale (McCullough, 1971), and ego identity as assessed by a semistructured interview (Podd, 1972) have all shown positive associations with moral judgment stages as measured by the Moral Judgment Inter-
Moral Structure and Moral Content
65
view (MJI). No relationship was found between Kohlberg's moral judgment stages and Rotter's Internal-External Scale (Arbuthnot, 1971) and need for structure as measured by the Autokinetic Test of Need for Structure (McNamee, 1972). The existence of a hypothesized personality profile, descriptive of each of the moral judgment stages, was unsupported (O'Connor, 1971). Several studies report a significant correlation between level of moral reasoning and personality as embodied in political ideology (Fishkin et al., 1973;Fontana and Noel, 1973; Haan et al., 1968). Specifically, these studies reported political conservatism to be correlated with use of conventional moral reasoning, and political liberalism or radicalism to be correlated with pre- or postconventional moral reasoning. All of the above studies reporting positive findings used less sophisticated methods of scoring the MJI which, due to theoretical and methodological revisions, have since been discarded by Kohlberg (1972b) as being too content biased. Such reports, therefore, require a guarded interpretation. Because Kohlberg's theory postulates cognitive-developmental structures of moral reasoning, to misscore content as structure may yield misleading results. It is possible that the above positive findings relating stages of moral judgment to personality are the result of confounding content and structure when scoring the MJI. Because Hogan's research has demonstrated clear relationships between personality and moral content, the SEA presents a unique opportunity to compare personality as embodied in moral content, with moral structure as measured by the MJI. Although the format of the SEA and the MJI differ, the moral content of elicited subject responses is basically the same. Thus, a comparison of these instruments should highlight the relationship between moral content and structure. Kohlberg maintains that there is no general equivalency between certain moral contents and any given stage in his cognitive-developmental model. There is, however, a small probabilistic relationship between specific contents and the highest stages (Kohlberg, 1972b). Specifically, the principled stages (Stages 5 and 6) have an affinity for the advocacy of individual rights and an orientation to one's conscience in moral decisions. Thus, while an orientation to Hogan's ethics of personal conscience does not predict postconventional morality, postconventionality should predict a tendency toward the ethics of personal conscience. It is probable that the developmental determinants of this relationship are personality factors that affect the attainment of principled moral structures. Recently, Kohlberg (1972b) has delineated four basic orientations to moral issues: normative order, pragmatic, fairness or justice, and ideal self. First, in the normative order orientation one orients to the rules and roles defined by the social order. Second, the pragmatic orientation focuses on consequences of action, and what is situationally necessary. Third, the justice orientation focuses on relations of equality, reciprocity, contract, and freedom from coercion between actors. And finally, in the ideal-self orientation, the orientation is to an
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"image of a good self and its motives, virtues and perfection in judging" (Kohlberg, 1972b, p. 21). These orientations are useful in defining substages or types of persons within a given stage. Kohlberg has subdivided his six stages into A and B orientations. The A orientation includes the normative order and pragmatic orientations. The B orientation includes the justice and ideal-self orientations. Kohlberg maintains that the B orientation is the more mature and "equilibrated" form for any given stage. It seems possible that Kohlberg's recently postulated orientations to moral issues may incorporate a personality component. To the extent that personality is a factor involved in one's orientation to moral issues, it is likely that the A-B distinction of moral orientation is related to Hogan's two ethics. That is, across all stages, subjects orienting to normative order or pragmatism (Orientation A) may tend toward an ethic of social responsibility. Conversely, subjects orienting to justice or the ideal self (Orientation B) may endorse an ethic of personal conscience. Although Hogan's and Kohlberg's approaches have been used extensively to study the moral development of adolescents and young adults, the two approaches have not been directly compared. Such a comparison was made in the present investigation to clarify differences between moral content and moral structure as well as to provide some basis for further discussion and study of the role of personality in moral development. In view of the considerations above, three hypotheses were advanced. First, it was predicted that the SEA would not be correlated with the MJI; second, that Orientation A subjects would obtain significantly higher SEA scores than Orientation B subjects; and third, that Stage 5 subjects would score lower (ethics of personal conscience) on the SEA than subjects of Stages 1-4.
METHOD
Subjects The subjects were 99 male students enrolled in lower division psychology courses at the University of Texas at Austin. All of the subjects were fulfilling a requirement that they participate in ongoing research. Ages of the subjects ranged from 16 to 32 with a mean of 21.3 years of age (SD = 3.28). Procedure
The SEA was administered to the subjects in groups of approximately 20. The SEA is self-explanatory, and subjects were allowed as much time as needed to complete it. At a later time each subject was individually administered the
Moral Structure and Moral Content
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MJI. Instructions to all subjects were: "Now I am going to read some stories to you and ask you some questions about them." The MJI took approximately 40 minutes to administer. All interviews were recorded and later transcribed for scoring. It should be noted that studies which have reported correlations between moral reasoning and personality and political ideology (Fishkin et al., 1973; Fontana and Noel, 1973; Haan et al., 1968) used paper-and-pencil moral interviews. This method does not allow adequate clarification of many responses and, therefore, makes scoring immeasurably more difficult than when a live interview is conducted. Survey of Ethical Attitudes. The SEA was designed to distinguish two antithetical sets of moral (and political) ideals: the ethics of personal conscience and the ethics of social responsibility. Low scores on the SEA are indicative of the former, while high scores are indicative of the latter. The SEA has two 35-item forms (Hogan, 1970). Parallel form reliability has ranged from 0.88-0.97 (Hogan, 1970). A validation study comparing a group of political activists with a group of policemen found that only 5% of the scores of the two distributions overlapped (Hogan, 1970). Form A of the SEA was used in the present study. Moral Judgment Interview. Kohlberg's model of moral development subsumes two stages under each of three levels of moral judgment: preconventional; conventional; and postconventional, or principled. Each stage or structure represents a coherent whole. The stages differ qualitatively and appear in the same order for all individuals. One's level of moral judgment is assessed using the MJI (Kohlberg, 1972b). In this interview, the subject is presented with several hypothetical moral dilemmas and is asked to resolve each dilemma by stating what he believes the central figure in the story should do. The subject's reasoning in support of his choice of action is analyzed to determine his level of moral judgment. The current study used Form A of the MJI, which includes Stories III, IV, I, and II (Kohlberg, 1972b). Since certain difficulties arise in accurately scoring college students' interview protocols (Kohlberg, 1972a; Kohlberg and Kramer, 1969), at Kohlberg's suggestion the Metaethical Probes were included in the interview. The Metaethical Probes are questions designed to discriminate the relativism of certain college students (Stage 4~) from the instrumental egoism of Stage 2 subjects. Scoring was done according to Kohlberg's most recent Issue Scoring Guide (1972b), which assigns a Moral Maturity Score (MMS) to each subject's interview protocol. The MMS, which ranges from 100 to 600, gives a single quantitative index of a subject's level of moral reasoning. Moral Orientation A (normative order and pragmatism) or Orientation B (justice and ideal self) was assigned to each interview protocol by means of a global "clinical" assessment. (See Kohlberg, 1969, 1972b, for more details on his theory and recent scoring system.) All MJI protocols were scored by one rater. To assess reliability of scoring, a random subsample of 20 protocols was scored by a second rater. Both raters were blind to the SEA scores of the subjects and had attended one of Kohlberg's
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instructional scoring seminars. A product-moment correlation between the MMSs of the two raters was 0.91. The same moral orientation was assigned by both raters to 85% of the protocols.
RESULTS
In examining the relationship between MMSs (M= 366.78; SD = 56.80) and scores on the SEA (M = 15.83; SD = 4.55), a nonsignificant Pearson productmoment correlation of - 0 . 0 3 was obtained. This supports the hypothesized absence of relationship between the SEA and MJI, and hence, between moral content and moral structure. Since 90% of the subjects were conventional (Stages 3 and 4), it can be argued that the low correlation may be due to the restricted range of MMSs. It is very important to note, however, that this distribution of MMSs is typical for the adult population, and that Kohlberg's sensitive scoring system still provides a 100-point range from one stage to the next. Nevertheless, present conclusions about the lack of relationship between personality and moral reasoning must be limited to Stages 3 and 4 of Kohlberg's system. Because the direction of results was in all cases predicted, all statistical tests were one tailed. Testing the hypothesis that the mean SEA scores for Stage 5 subjects (M = 13.75) are lower than the mean SEA scores for subjects at Stages 1-4 (M= 15.92) was seriously hampered by the disproportionate group sizes: N = 4 and N = 95, respectively. The difference (t < 1) was in the predicted direction, but the small number of Stage 5 subjects does not provide an adequate base for firm conclusions. The mean SEA score for subjects with an orientation toward pragmatism and the normative order (Orientation A) was 16.84 (SD = 4.32); the mean SEA score for subjects with a justice or ideal-self orientation (Orientation B) was 14.06 (SD=4.45). A significant difference (rpbi=0.30; t = 3 . 1 1 , d f = 9 7 , p < 0.005) was found, which supports the hypothesis of a significant relationship between moral orientation and personality as embodied in moral content on the SEA. A difference in mean MMS for Orientation A versus Orientation B would indicate the presence of a developmental factor in Kohlberg's A-B distinction. However, an analysis of differences in the mean MMS of Orientation A (M = 369.50; SD = 57.91) and Orientation B (M= 362.10; SD = 56.80) was nonsignificant (rpbi = 0.06, df = 97, t < 1). Thus, in this study Kohlberg's contention that Orientation B is the more mature form of any given stage is not reflected in the mean MMS of the two orientations. To test further the possible existence of a developmental aspect to the SEA, a Pearson r was calculated to examine the relationship between age and SEA scores (r = 0.00). In comparison, the correlation between age and MMS was 0.36
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69
(p < 0.001). This difference in the developmental nature of the SEA and the MJI is congruent with the absence of relationship between moral content (SEA) and cognitive-developmental moral structures (MJI).
DISCUSSION
Given the similarity of the moral content elicited from subjects by the SEA and MJI, the lack of relationship between scores obtained by subjects on the two instruments underscores the importance of distinguishing between content and structure. This finding supports the contention that identical moral contents can be structured at different levels of moral development (Kohlberg, 1972b; Turiel, 1974). Furthermore, because it is a comparison of Kohlberg's theory with a different theoretical position, the present study represents an extension of the Kohlberg and Turiel conclusions which were based solely on Kohlberg's research data. Since Hogan (1970) maintains that a person's choice between the two ethics is inseparably tied to personality structure, and since the SEA correlates with so many personality factors, the lack of relationship between the SEA and the MJI suggests that moral reasoning at Stages 3 and 4 is not related to things that we usually assess as "personality." Hogan's recent discussion (1975) of moral character raises the interesting possibility that Kohlberg's MJI assesses views about social issues in general rather than views actually governing behavior. These latter views are largely unconscious and closely tied to character structure. Admittedly, the data validating Hogan's ethical constructs are correlational, which raises the question of the direction of causality in the relationship between personality and moral content. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence in the Hogan literature is substantial and strongly supports Hogan's theoretical position. In short, the present study suggests that personality factors are related to moral content, but not to moral structure. This conclusion casts doubt on prior studies which reported significant relationships between personality and conventional moral structure. This is especially so, since these same studies measured moral level by a method that Kohlberg (1972b) contends is content biased. Furthermore, in light of the present results, future investigators should assess the impact on their results of the relative frequency of A and B subjects in their sampies. For example, to obtain breadth of political attitudes, Fishkin et aL (1973) selected their subjects instead of using a random sample. This procedure may have seriously biased their sample of conservative subjects in favor of Orientation A. Therefore, although conclusions about the relationship between personality (as embodied in political ideology) and moral reasoning must be limited to Stages 3 and 4, the importance of the present findings is not diminished. That is, although previous studies have reported a strong relationship between political conservat-
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ism and conventional moral reasoning, the present study clearly indicates a very substantial diversity of moral and political attitudes among a random college sample of morally conventional subjects. Similarly, these findings have important meaning for the controversy as to whether political liberals or conservatives are more morally "mature" (Snodgrass, 1975). Specifically, the data suggest that one can espouse either ideology from several of Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning. The significant correlation between moral orientation and SEA scores is intriguing. If personality is the common factor in the SEA and moral orientation, then this lhading indicates that personality components are involved in the choice of moral issues to which a person orients his moral thinking (moral orientation). The matter, however, is complex because Kohlberg (1972b)maintains that Orientation B is the more mature form for any given stage. The present findings revealed no significant differences in the mean MMS for Orientation A subjects compared with Orientation B subjects. Kohlberg, however, does not imply the existence of such a difference. Rather, he states that there exists a distinct difference in the quality of structural equilibrium between Orientation A and Orientation B, and this difference is such that it is not manifested in MMS. Furthermore, an individual does not have to equilibrate to a B Orientation before progressing to the next moral stage. One can progress from stage to stage while maintaining an A Orientation. Kohlberg believes that most people eventually equilibrate to a B Orientation, but concedes that personality factors may hamper or prevent this outcome (Kohlberg, 1973). Although the present findings do not indicate any relationship between personality and moral reasoning (at Stages 3 and 4), personality may affect moral progression at critical transition points. For example, the mental and characterological rigidity frequently found in Orientation A subjects could effectively bar them from thinking about or exposing themselves to the moral issues that are vital to the transition from Stage 4 to Stage 5. The findings of Haan et al. (1968) are congruent with this hypothesis. In comparing conventional and postconventional college students, Haan et al. (1968) reported that the child-rearing practices of parents of conventional students "do not release young people to be affected by their own experience" (p. 200). Moreover, personality factors may greatly influence development from preconventional (Stages 1 and 2) to conventional moral levels (Stages 3 and 4). For example, recent research (Campagna and Harter, 1975; Fodor, 1973; Jurkovic, 1976) has demonstrated that psychopathic delinquents lag significantly behind their nonpsychopathic delinquent and nondelinquent counterparts in their relinquishment of Stage 1 and 2 thinking. The delineation of personality variables relevant to stage transition (particularly from Stage 2 to 3 and from Stage 4 to 5) represents an important area for further research.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to the participants in the research seminar led by J a m e s Bieri for their helpful c o m m e n t s on the results herein reported. Special thanks are expressed to Martin Manosevitz and R o b e r t C o o p e r for their constructive c o m m e n t s on an earlier draft o f this paper.
REFERENCES
Arbuthnot, J. B. (1971). Field independence, maturity of moral judgment, critical distinctive feature analysis, and perceived locus of control. Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University, University Microfilms No. 71-25, 146, Ann Arbor. Campagna, A. F., and Harter, S. (1975). Moral judgment in sociopathic and normal children. J. Personal Soc. PsychoL 31: 199-205. Fishkin, J., Kenniston, K., and MacKinnon, C. (1973). Moral reasoning and political ideology. J. Personal Soc. PsychoL 27:109-119. Fodor, E. M. (1973). Moral development and parent behavior antecedents in adolescent psychopaths. J. Genet. PsychoL 122. 37-43. Fontana, A. F., and Noel, B. (1973). Moral reasoning in the university. J, Personal Soc. PsychoL 27: 419-429. Haan, N., Smith, M. B., and Block, J. (1968). The moral reasoning of young adults: Politicalsocial behavior, family background and personality correlates. J. Personal Soc. PsychoL 10: 183-201. Hogan, R. (1970). A dimension of moral judgment. J. Consult. Clin. PsychoL 35: 205-212. Hogan, R. (1975). The structure of moral character and the explanation of moral action. J. Youth Adoles. 4: 1-15. Hogan, R., and Diekstein, E. (1972). Moral judgment and perceptions of injustice. J. Personal. Soc. PsychoL 23: 409-413. Jurkovic, G. J. (1976). The relationship of moral and cognitive development to dimensions of juvenile delinquency. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, University Microfilms No. 76-8054, Ann Arbor. Kohlberg, L. (1964). The development of moral character and ideology. In Hoffman, M. L., and Hoffman, L. W. (eds.), Review of Child Development Research, Vol. I, Russell Sage, New York. Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In Goslin, D. (ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand McNally, Chicago. Kohlberg, L. (1971). From is to ought: How to commit the naturalistic fallacy and get away with it in the study of moral development. In Michael, T. (ed.), Cognitive Development and Epistemology, Academic Press, New York. Kohlberg, L. (1972a). Continuities in childhood and adult moral development: Revisited. Paper presented at the Life Span Conference at the University of West Virginia, Morgantown. Kohlberg, L. (1972b). Issue scoring guide. Mimeographed, Harvard University. Kohlberg, L. (1973). Personal communication. Kohlberg, L., and Kramer, R. (1969). Continuities and discontinuities in children and adult moral development. Hum. Dev. 12: 93-120. McCullough, E. D. (1971). Moral development profile variability: Its relationship to choice of preferred stage of moral reasoning and to Rokeach's open-closed belief system. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto, National Library of Canada, Ottawa.
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McNamee, S. M. (1972). Moral behavior, moral development and needs in students and political activists, with special reference to the law and order stage of development. Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, University Microfilm No. 72-26,187, Ann Arbor. Myers, I. B. (1962). Manual: The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Educational Testing Service, Princeton. O'Connor, J. (1971). Developmental changes in abstractness and moral reasoning. Doctoral dissertation, George Peabody College for Teachers, University Microfilm Order No. 72-3831, Ann Arbor. Podd, M. H. (1972). Ego identity status and morality. The relationship between two developmental constructs. Dev. Psychol. 6: 497-507. Snodgrass, S. R. (1975). Some relationships between sociopolitical ideology and moral character among college youth. J. Youth Adoles. 4: 195-205. Sullivan, E., and Quarter, J. (1972). Psychological correlates of certain post-conventional moral types: A perspective on hybrid types. J. Personal. 40: 149-161. Turiel, E. (1974). Conflict and transition in adolescent moral development. Child Dev. 45: 14-29.
Moral Structure and Moral Content: Their Relationship to Personality Paul F. Dell 1,3 and Gregory J. Jurkovie 2
Received March 22, 1977
The relationship between personality as embodied in the moral content o f the Survey o f Ethical Attitudes (SEA) and moral structure as measured by the Kohlberg Moral Judgment Interview (MJI) was investigated using 99 male college students. No relationship was found between scores on the SEA and Moral Maturity Scores on the MJI, although this finding was qualified by the fact that the MJ1 Scores for most students were restricted to Kohlberg's conventional range o f morality. However, SEA scores were significantly correlated with the Moral Orientation scores obtained from the MJI. In contrast to scores on the SEA, scores on the MJ1 were significantly related to age. The problem o f confusing content and structure in moral development research was explored. The theoretical implications o f a personality component being involved in choice o f moral orientation were discussed as well.
INTRODUCTION The relationship between personality and moral development during adolescence and early adulthood has become the topic o f increased analysis in recent years. Yet studies in this area have often obscured or ignored important This research was partly supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH-16899).
a Instructor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Texas Medical Branch. Major interests are in the area of moral development and family theories of psychopathology. 2Department of Psychiatry, Children's Hospital Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts. Received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Major interests are sociocognitive development of children and clinical child psychology. 3 All correspondence should be addressed to Paul F. Dell, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas 77550. 63 0047-2891/78/0300-0063 $05.00/0 9 1978 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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differences between the content of moral attitudes and the structure of the reasoning supporting these attitudes. Individuals may endorse the same ideological beliefs and values (content) for reasons that qualitatively differ in conceptual style (structure). Because of problems in distinguishing moral content from structure, the precise nature of the relation of personality factors to moral development remains unclear. Hogan (1970) has studied the relationship of moral content to personality. Using the 35.item Survey of Ethical Attitudes (SEA), Hogan has investigated the disposition of an individual to adopt the ethics of personal conscience or the ethics of social responsibility. According to the ethics of personal conscience, there exists higher laws, unrelated to human legislation, which one can discover by intuition or reason (Hogan, 1970). The ethics of social responsibility assert that there is no such thing as a "higher law," and that "the most defensible criteria for evaluating social action are the existing legal system and the general welfare of society" (Hogan, 1970, p. 206). Hogan's basic thesis is that one's moral position is an integral part of one's personality structure. Hogan (1970) found that the ethics of personal conscience were correlated with low scores on the California F Scale. Examining the pattern of correlations of the SEA with the California Psychological Inventory, he found personal conscience subjects to be independent and innovative, as well as opportunistic, irresponsible, and given to rash behavior. Similarly, on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1962), Hogan found these subjects to be individualistic, enthusiastic innovators who had faith in intuition. Finally, these subjects were found to doubt the efficacy of legislated laws as a means for promoting human welfare, and to believe that institutions are the source of human injustice (Hogan and Dickstein, 1972). High scores on the SEA (ethics of social responsibility) had high scores on the California F Scale (Hogan, 1970). On the California Psychological Inventory, social responsibility subjects appeared well socialized and even-tempered, but also unoriginal and perhaps inclined to resist social change (Hogan, 1970). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator showed these subjects to be diligent, systematic workers who are counterintuitive and prefer everything to remain on a factual basis (Hogan, 1970). Finally, subjects with an ethic of social responsibility were found to have faith in the instrumental value of the law and to believe that injustice results from the actions of individuals (Hogan and Dickstein, 1972). In a similar vein, studies relating Kohlberg's moral stages or structures to various measures of personality have been reported. The California F Scale (Kohlberg, 1964), various scales on the Omnibus Personality Inventory (Sullivan and Quarter, 1972), an adjective Q-sort of perceived and ideal selves (Haan et al., 1968), Rokeach's Dogmatism Scale (McCullough, 1971), and ego identity as assessed by a semistructured interview (Podd, 1972) have all shown positive associations with moral judgment stages as measured by the Moral Judgment Inter-
Moral Structure and Moral Content
65
view (MJI). No relationship was found between Kohlberg's moral judgment stages and Rotter's Internal-External Scale (Arbuthnot, 1971) and need for structure as measured by the Autokinetic Test of Need for Structure (McNamee, 1972). The existence of a hypothesized personality profile, descriptive of each of the moral judgment stages, was unsupported (O'Connor, 1971). Several studies report a significant correlation between level of moral reasoning and personality as embodied in political ideology (Fishkin et al., 1973;Fontana and Noel, 1973; Haan et al., 1968). Specifically, these studies reported political conservatism to be correlated with use of conventional moral reasoning, and political liberalism or radicalism to be correlated with pre- or postconventional moral reasoning. All of the above studies reporting positive findings used less sophisticated methods of scoring the MJI which, due to theoretical and methodological revisions, have since been discarded by Kohlberg (1972b) as being too content biased. Such reports, therefore, require a guarded interpretation. Because Kohlberg's theory postulates cognitive-developmental structures of moral reasoning, to misscore content as structure may yield misleading results. It is possible that the above positive findings relating stages of moral judgment to personality are the result of confounding content and structure when scoring the MJI. Because Hogan's research has demonstrated clear relationships between personality and moral content, the SEA presents a unique opportunity to compare personality as embodied in moral content, with moral structure as measured by the MJI. Although the format of the SEA and the MJI differ, the moral content of elicited subject responses is basically the same. Thus, a comparison of these instruments should highlight the relationship between moral content and structure. Kohlberg maintains that there is no general equivalency between certain moral contents and any given stage in his cognitive-developmental model. There is, however, a small probabilistic relationship between specific contents and the highest stages (Kohlberg, 1972b). Specifically, the principled stages (Stages 5 and 6) have an affinity for the advocacy of individual rights and an orientation to one's conscience in moral decisions. Thus, while an orientation to Hogan's ethics of personal conscience does not predict postconventional morality, postconventionality should predict a tendency toward the ethics of personal conscience. It is probable that the developmental determinants of this relationship are personality factors that affect the attainment of principled moral structures. Recently, Kohlberg (1972b) has delineated four basic orientations to moral issues: normative order, pragmatic, fairness or justice, and ideal self. First, in the normative order orientation one orients to the rules and roles defined by the social order. Second, the pragmatic orientation focuses on consequences of action, and what is situationally necessary. Third, the justice orientation focuses on relations of equality, reciprocity, contract, and freedom from coercion between actors. And finally, in the ideal-self orientation, the orientation is to an
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"image of a good self and its motives, virtues and perfection in judging" (Kohlberg, 1972b, p. 21). These orientations are useful in defining substages or types of persons within a given stage. Kohlberg has subdivided his six stages into A and B orientations. The A orientation includes the normative order and pragmatic orientations. The B orientation includes the justice and ideal-self orientations. Kohlberg maintains that the B orientation is the more mature and "equilibrated" form for any given stage. It seems possible that Kohlberg's recently postulated orientations to moral issues may incorporate a personality component. To the extent that personality is a factor involved in one's orientation to moral issues, it is likely that the A-B distinction of moral orientation is related to Hogan's two ethics. That is, across all stages, subjects orienting to normative order or pragmatism (Orientation A) may tend toward an ethic of social responsibility. Conversely, subjects orienting to justice or the ideal self (Orientation B) may endorse an ethic of personal conscience. Although Hogan's and Kohlberg's approaches have been used extensively to study the moral development of adolescents and young adults, the two approaches have not been directly compared. Such a comparison was made in the present investigation to clarify differences between moral content and moral structure as well as to provide some basis for further discussion and study of the role of personality in moral development. In view of the considerations above, three hypotheses were advanced. First, it was predicted that the SEA would not be correlated with the MJI; second, that Orientation A subjects would obtain significantly higher SEA scores than Orientation B subjects; and third, that Stage 5 subjects would score lower (ethics of personal conscience) on the SEA than subjects of Stages 1-4.
METHOD
Subjects The subjects were 99 male students enrolled in lower division psychology courses at the University of Texas at Austin. All of the subjects were fulfilling a requirement that they participate in ongoing research. Ages of the subjects ranged from 16 to 32 with a mean of 21.3 years of age (SD = 3.28). Procedure
The SEA was administered to the subjects in groups of approximately 20. The SEA is self-explanatory, and subjects were allowed as much time as needed to complete it. At a later time each subject was individually administered the
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MJI. Instructions to all subjects were: "Now I am going to read some stories to you and ask you some questions about them." The MJI took approximately 40 minutes to administer. All interviews were recorded and later transcribed for scoring. It should be noted that studies which have reported correlations between moral reasoning and personality and political ideology (Fishkin et al., 1973; Fontana and Noel, 1973; Haan et al., 1968) used paper-and-pencil moral interviews. This method does not allow adequate clarification of many responses and, therefore, makes scoring immeasurably more difficult than when a live interview is conducted. Survey of Ethical Attitudes. The SEA was designed to distinguish two antithetical sets of moral (and political) ideals: the ethics of personal conscience and the ethics of social responsibility. Low scores on the SEA are indicative of the former, while high scores are indicative of the latter. The SEA has two 35-item forms (Hogan, 1970). Parallel form reliability has ranged from 0.88-0.97 (Hogan, 1970). A validation study comparing a group of political activists with a group of policemen found that only 5% of the scores of the two distributions overlapped (Hogan, 1970). Form A of the SEA was used in the present study. Moral Judgment Interview. Kohlberg's model of moral development subsumes two stages under each of three levels of moral judgment: preconventional; conventional; and postconventional, or principled. Each stage or structure represents a coherent whole. The stages differ qualitatively and appear in the same order for all individuals. One's level of moral judgment is assessed using the MJI (Kohlberg, 1972b). In this interview, the subject is presented with several hypothetical moral dilemmas and is asked to resolve each dilemma by stating what he believes the central figure in the story should do. The subject's reasoning in support of his choice of action is analyzed to determine his level of moral judgment. The current study used Form A of the MJI, which includes Stories III, IV, I, and II (Kohlberg, 1972b). Since certain difficulties arise in accurately scoring college students' interview protocols (Kohlberg, 1972a; Kohlberg and Kramer, 1969), at Kohlberg's suggestion the Metaethical Probes were included in the interview. The Metaethical Probes are questions designed to discriminate the relativism of certain college students (Stage 4~) from the instrumental egoism of Stage 2 subjects. Scoring was done according to Kohlberg's most recent Issue Scoring Guide (1972b), which assigns a Moral Maturity Score (MMS) to each subject's interview protocol. The MMS, which ranges from 100 to 600, gives a single quantitative index of a subject's level of moral reasoning. Moral Orientation A (normative order and pragmatism) or Orientation B (justice and ideal self) was assigned to each interview protocol by means of a global "clinical" assessment. (See Kohlberg, 1969, 1972b, for more details on his theory and recent scoring system.) All MJI protocols were scored by one rater. To assess reliability of scoring, a random subsample of 20 protocols was scored by a second rater. Both raters were blind to the SEA scores of the subjects and had attended one of Kohlberg's
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instructional scoring seminars. A product-moment correlation between the MMSs of the two raters was 0.91. The same moral orientation was assigned by both raters to 85% of the protocols.
RESULTS
In examining the relationship between MMSs (M= 366.78; SD = 56.80) and scores on the SEA (M = 15.83; SD = 4.55), a nonsignificant Pearson productmoment correlation of - 0 . 0 3 was obtained. This supports the hypothesized absence of relationship between the SEA and MJI, and hence, between moral content and moral structure. Since 90% of the subjects were conventional (Stages 3 and 4), it can be argued that the low correlation may be due to the restricted range of MMSs. It is very important to note, however, that this distribution of MMSs is typical for the adult population, and that Kohlberg's sensitive scoring system still provides a 100-point range from one stage to the next. Nevertheless, present conclusions about the lack of relationship between personality and moral reasoning must be limited to Stages 3 and 4 of Kohlberg's system. Because the direction of results was in all cases predicted, all statistical tests were one tailed. Testing the hypothesis that the mean SEA scores for Stage 5 subjects (M = 13.75) are lower than the mean SEA scores for subjects at Stages 1-4 (M= 15.92) was seriously hampered by the disproportionate group sizes: N = 4 and N = 95, respectively. The difference (t < 1) was in the predicted direction, but the small number of Stage 5 subjects does not provide an adequate base for firm conclusions. The mean SEA score for subjects with an orientation toward pragmatism and the normative order (Orientation A) was 16.84 (SD = 4.32); the mean SEA score for subjects with a justice or ideal-self orientation (Orientation B) was 14.06 (SD=4.45). A significant difference (rpbi=0.30; t = 3 . 1 1 , d f = 9 7 , p < 0.005) was found, which supports the hypothesis of a significant relationship between moral orientation and personality as embodied in moral content on the SEA. A difference in mean MMS for Orientation A versus Orientation B would indicate the presence of a developmental factor in Kohlberg's A-B distinction. However, an analysis of differences in the mean MMS of Orientation A (M = 369.50; SD = 57.91) and Orientation B (M= 362.10; SD = 56.80) was nonsignificant (rpbi = 0.06, df = 97, t < 1). Thus, in this study Kohlberg's contention that Orientation B is the more mature form of any given stage is not reflected in the mean MMS of the two orientations. To test further the possible existence of a developmental aspect to the SEA, a Pearson r was calculated to examine the relationship between age and SEA scores (r = 0.00). In comparison, the correlation between age and MMS was 0.36
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(p < 0.001). This difference in the developmental nature of the SEA and the MJI is congruent with the absence of relationship between moral content (SEA) and cognitive-developmental moral structures (MJI).
DISCUSSION
Given the similarity of the moral content elicited from subjects by the SEA and MJI, the lack of relationship between scores obtained by subjects on the two instruments underscores the importance of distinguishing between content and structure. This finding supports the contention that identical moral contents can be structured at different levels of moral development (Kohlberg, 1972b; Turiel, 1974). Furthermore, because it is a comparison of Kohlberg's theory with a different theoretical position, the present study represents an extension of the Kohlberg and Turiel conclusions which were based solely on Kohlberg's research data. Since Hogan (1970) maintains that a person's choice between the two ethics is inseparably tied to personality structure, and since the SEA correlates with so many personality factors, the lack of relationship between the SEA and the MJI suggests that moral reasoning at Stages 3 and 4 is not related to things that we usually assess as "personality." Hogan's recent discussion (1975) of moral character raises the interesting possibility that Kohlberg's MJI assesses views about social issues in general rather than views actually governing behavior. These latter views are largely unconscious and closely tied to character structure. Admittedly, the data validating Hogan's ethical constructs are correlational, which raises the question of the direction of causality in the relationship between personality and moral content. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence in the Hogan literature is substantial and strongly supports Hogan's theoretical position. In short, the present study suggests that personality factors are related to moral content, but not to moral structure. This conclusion casts doubt on prior studies which reported significant relationships between personality and conventional moral structure. This is especially so, since these same studies measured moral level by a method that Kohlberg (1972b) contends is content biased. Furthermore, in light of the present results, future investigators should assess the impact on their results of the relative frequency of A and B subjects in their sampies. For example, to obtain breadth of political attitudes, Fishkin et aL (1973) selected their subjects instead of using a random sample. This procedure may have seriously biased their sample of conservative subjects in favor of Orientation A. Therefore, although conclusions about the relationship between personality (as embodied in political ideology) and moral reasoning must be limited to Stages 3 and 4, the importance of the present findings is not diminished. That is, although previous studies have reported a strong relationship between political conservat-
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ism and conventional moral reasoning, the present study clearly indicates a very substantial diversity of moral and political attitudes among a random college sample of morally conventional subjects. Similarly, these findings have important meaning for the controversy as to whether political liberals or conservatives are more morally "mature" (Snodgrass, 1975). Specifically, the data suggest that one can espouse either ideology from several of Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning. The significant correlation between moral orientation and SEA scores is intriguing. If personality is the common factor in the SEA and moral orientation, then this lhading indicates that personality components are involved in the choice of moral issues to which a person orients his moral thinking (moral orientation). The matter, however, is complex because Kohlberg (1972b)maintains that Orientation B is the more mature form for any given stage. The present findings revealed no significant differences in the mean MMS for Orientation A subjects compared with Orientation B subjects. Kohlberg, however, does not imply the existence of such a difference. Rather, he states that there exists a distinct difference in the quality of structural equilibrium between Orientation A and Orientation B, and this difference is such that it is not manifested in MMS. Furthermore, an individual does not have to equilibrate to a B Orientation before progressing to the next moral stage. One can progress from stage to stage while maintaining an A Orientation. Kohlberg believes that most people eventually equilibrate to a B Orientation, but concedes that personality factors may hamper or prevent this outcome (Kohlberg, 1973). Although the present findings do not indicate any relationship between personality and moral reasoning (at Stages 3 and 4), personality may affect moral progression at critical transition points. For example, the mental and characterological rigidity frequently found in Orientation A subjects could effectively bar them from thinking about or exposing themselves to the moral issues that are vital to the transition from Stage 4 to Stage 5. The findings of Haan et al. (1968) are congruent with this hypothesis. In comparing conventional and postconventional college students, Haan et al. (1968) reported that the child-rearing practices of parents of conventional students "do not release young people to be affected by their own experience" (p. 200). Moreover, personality factors may greatly influence development from preconventional (Stages 1 and 2) to conventional moral levels (Stages 3 and 4). For example, recent research (Campagna and Harter, 1975; Fodor, 1973; Jurkovic, 1976) has demonstrated that psychopathic delinquents lag significantly behind their nonpsychopathic delinquent and nondelinquent counterparts in their relinquishment of Stage 1 and 2 thinking. The delineation of personality variables relevant to stage transition (particularly from Stage 2 to 3 and from Stage 4 to 5) represents an important area for further research.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to the participants in the research seminar led by J a m e s Bieri for their helpful c o m m e n t s on the results herein reported. Special thanks are expressed to Martin Manosevitz and R o b e r t C o o p e r for their constructive c o m m e n t s on an earlier draft o f this paper.
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