This article was downloaded by: [Carnegie Mellon University] On: 12 January 2015, At: 16:01 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
The Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vgnt20
Maturity of Moral Judgment Stephen Harris a
a b
, Paul Mussen
a b
& Eldred Rutherford
a b
California State University , USA
b
Institute of Human Development University , Berkeley , California , 94720 , USA Published online: 04 Sep 2012.
To cite this article: Stephen Harris , Paul Mussen & Eldred Rutherford (1976) Maturity of Moral Judgment, The Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development, 128:1, 123-135, DOI: 10.1080/00221325.1976.10533980 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221325.1976.10533980
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
Downloaded by [Carnegie Mellon University] at 16:01 12 January 2015
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The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1976, 128, 123-135.
SOME COGNITIVE, BEHAVIORAL, AND PERSONALITY CORRELATES OF MATURITY OF MORAL JUDGMENT* * Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley; and California State University at Son Jose
STEPHEN HARRIS,*PAUL MUSSEN,AND ELDREDRUTHERFORD
Downloaded by [Carnegie Mellon University] at 16:01 12 January 2015
SUMMARY This study was designed to test the hypothesis that maturity of moral judgment is related to moral behavior and to certain personality characteristics. The Ss, 33 fifth grade boys (approximately lOY?-years of age), were given the Kohlberg test of moral judgment, and scores on this test were related to a measure of general intelligence, moral conduct as judged by peers (sociometric nominations), honesty in a structured test, and certain personality variables. Maturity of moral judgment was found to be significantly correlated with general cognitive ability (intelligence test performance) and, even with intelligence partialed out, with resistance to temptation, reputation for being concerned with the welfare of others, selfconfidence, and security in social relationships with peers. A. INTRODUCTION While interest in moral development has burgeoned in the last decade, the focus of most research has been primarily on the cognitive aspects of morality-moral judgment and reasoning. Very recently there has been an increase in studies examining relationships between these cognitive aspects and moral conduct or behavior, although there are still relatively few of
* Received in the Editorial Office, Provincetown, Massachusetts, on September 20, 1974. Copyright, 1976, by The Journal Press. This study, conducted at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, United States Public Health Service, under Research Grant HD 01650. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Herbert H. Wong, principal, M i w i n Mose and Richard Whittington, teachers, and the pupils of their fifth grade classes for their cooperation in this investigation. Requests for reprints should be sent to the second author at the address shown at the end of this article. * Now at Community Mental Health Program, Contra Costa County Medical Services, Martinez., California. 123
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these. For example, Kohlberg (6) reported that among children in the sixth grade, maturity of moral judgment, as indexed by scores on his own test, correlated significantly with teacher’s ratings of moral conscientiousness (Y = .46) and fair-mindedness with peers (Y = .54) and with peer ratings of moral character (r = 5 8 ) . Scores on the Kohlberg test of moral maturity have also been found to be moderately and positively related to honesty in a structured “game” in which it was easy to cheat (7). Sixth grade children whose responses showed that their moral decisions were at a principled level (stage 5 or 6 of the Kohlberg test) manifested greater resistance to temptation than those whose responses were at lower moral levels. The study reported in this paper replicates some earlier studies and attempts to extend the findings by examining some other correlates of maturity of moral thinking. Specifically, we investigated the relationships between children’s moral judgment levels, assessed by means of the Kohlberg test, and the following variables: general intelligence, moral conduct as judged by reputation with peers (sociometric nominations), honesty in a school “test”, and certain aspects of adjustment measured by personality scales.
B . METHODS 1. Subjects Thirty-three boys in two fifth grade classes of an elementary school served as Ss. They ranged in age from 10 years to 11 years, 2 months with a mean of 10 years, 6 months. All of them were of normal intelligence and came from lower-middle or upper-lower class families. 2.
General Procedure
The Ss participated in four sessions. During the first, a group session conducted during a class period, each S completed a self-concept scale and a sociometric questionnaire. a . Sociometric measures. The sociometric questionnaire was the source of data on moral behavior in everyday social interactions. It consisted of 20 items, most of them dealing with conformity to rules, honesty, generosity, and helpfulness. The following items are examples: Which boys are willing to share things with other children? Which boys are most likely to follow the rules even when the teacher is not around? Which boys would never copy another.person’s answers on a test? Which boys try to help someone who has gotten hurt? Each boy was given a list of the names of all the boys
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STEPHEN HARRIS,
et d.
125
in his class and instructed to nominate, for each item, the three who “are most likely to do what the question says.” The S’s score on each sociometric item was the number of nominations he received from classmates divided by the number of possible nominations (i.e., the number of boys in that class). Thus, the S’s scores in the sociometric items indicate his reputation with his same sex peers. The assumption underlying the use of sociometric criteria of moral behavior is that since children interact with one another frequently and in many different kinds of situations, they are likely to be good judges of one another’s conduct and habitual modes of reacting. In fact, it might be argued that peers make more extensive, and perhaps intensive, observations of another child’s moral behavior than teachers do, and their observations are probably relatively freer of halo effects related to the child’s academic performance. For these reasons, peers’ evaluations of a child’s moral actions may be more accurate and meaningful than teachers’ ratings of these qualities. As anticipated, scores on the 20 sociometric items were found to be highly intercorrelated. The matrix of intercorrelations was then subjected to factor analyses by the principal components method, the factors being rotated by Kaiser’s Varimax criterion (5). These analyses yielded an Honesty factor and an Altruism (generosity or consideration of others) factor. Scores for these factors were derived for each S by selecting the items that had the highest loading on each of these factors and summing his standard scores for these items. The Honesty factor score was based on scores for the following four items: Which ones would never copy another person’s answers on a test? Which boys are most likely to follow the rules even when the teacher is not around? Which boys would never lie to the teacher? Which boys would never try to get out of school by pretending to be sick? The Altruism factor scores were derived from these four items: Which boys will stick up for some kid that others are teasing or talking about? Which boys would bawl someone out for hurting another child? Which boys always try to break up an unfair fight? Which ones will try to tell the teacher what really happened if the teacher is scolding a child for something he didn’t do? b. Personality tests. The self-concept scale consisted of 70 statements adapted from Coopersmith (1) by Perkins and Shannon (9), who rephrased some of the original items and added others. Each S was instructed to read each statement and to indicate by a checkmark whether the statement described him “most of the time,” “sometimes,” or “hardly ever.” Half the
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items were stated in a positive form and half in a negative way. The 70 items were grouped into four categories or subscales: 13 dealt with adjustment to parents (e.g., My parents consider my feelings. My parents expect too much of me.); 12 with adjustment to peers (e.g., I am popular with kids my own age. Kids pick on me.); eight with school adjustment (e.g., I am proud of my school work. I feel upset in school.); and 36 with self-esteem or self-conjidence (e.g., I am easy to like. I am pretty happy. I feel like I am a failure. ). With these data, it was possible to examine relationships between measures of moral behavior and personal adjustment, including both specific problems (indicated by responses to individual items) and broad areas of adjustment (measured by subscale scores; i.e., total scores based on all items of a subscale, such as adjustment to peers). A week after the Ss had completed the self-concept and sociometric questionnaires a research worker returned for the second session, a groupadministered resistance-to-temptation task based on the “duplicating technique” of Hartshorne and May (3). Seated in their usual places in their own classroom, the Ss were told by the examiner that they would be given two tests, one a test of word-meaning, the other of arithmetic. It was explained that this was an aspect of a University research study of the abilities of fifth graders. Confidentiality of the results was assured; no one’s scores would be reported to the teacher or to the school. The tests and IBM answer sheets were then distributed and the Ss were given instructions about how to mark their answers to the multiple-choice questions on the tests. The word-meaning and arithmetic tests contained 30 items each, taken from old forms of the Stanford Achievement Test that are not in current use. Both answer sheets were collected a t the completion of the testing session, and although the Ss were not aware of it, the answers marked by each child were copied by the investigators. One week after this testing session, the investigator who had administered the test visited the school again (the Ss’ third session), ostensibly to administer further tests. Ss were informed that because of work pressures, the investigator had not had time to correct the tests and he would appreciate their helping him by correcting their own papers. Each S’s two anwer sheets were returned to him, together with answer keys for the tests, and he was asked to mark his incorrect answers with an “X” and to record the number of his correct answers on each test. The sheets were then returned to the investigator who compared this record with the f ’s original responses.
Downloaded by [Carnegie Mellon University] at 16:01 12 January 2015
STEPHEN HARRIS,
et al.
127
Cheating could occur in several ways: incorrect items could be erased and remarked; items that had been left unanswered could be marked; incorrect answers might not be marked by an X; or total score could be reported incorrectly. The fourth testing session took place approximately a week after completion of the duplicating technique. At this time, the nine-story Kohlberg moral judgment test was administered to each S in an individual session. In order to minimize the possibility that Ss would perceive any connection between this test and the techniques administered in earlier sessions, the moral judgment test was administered by a researcher whom the children had not previously met. Two researchers, trained in a workshop conducted by Professor Kohlberg, used the stage-weighted system in scoring the Kohlberg test. The measure of intelligence used in this study was the vocabulary (word-meaning) score originally obtained in the duplicating technique procedure, the resistance-to-temptation measure. These vocabulary scores based on items taken from the Stanford Achievement Test, were very highly correlated with the Henmon-Nelson Intelligence Test scores (r = .86),which were available for 31 of the Ss. Clearly, this vocabulary score is an excellent gauge of general intelligence as ordinarily measured. The intelligence measure served two purposes in this research. First, it permitted a further direct check on Kohlberg’s assertion (6) that moral development is related to general cognitive development. Second, intelligence test performance has been shown to be significantly related to several of the major measures used in this study-to moral maturity as measured by the Kohlberg scale (6), to resistance-to-temptation (3), and to sociometric status of popularity. The focus of this investigation, however, was on the relationship between moral judgment and moral conduct, over and above any relationships attributable to intelligence alone. The scores on the word-meaning test permitted us to partial out or eliminate the possible influence of intelligence on these correlations. C.
RESULTS
The correlation between the Kohlberg tests of moral judgment and intelligence as measured by vocabulary score, for the 10-year-olds in this study, was .52 (p =
The Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vgnt20
Maturity of Moral Judgment Stephen Harris a
a b
, Paul Mussen
a b
& Eldred Rutherford
a b
California State University , USA
b
Institute of Human Development University , Berkeley , California , 94720 , USA Published online: 04 Sep 2012.
To cite this article: Stephen Harris , Paul Mussen & Eldred Rutherford (1976) Maturity of Moral Judgment, The Journal of Genetic Psychology: Research and Theory on Human Development, 128:1, 123-135, DOI: 10.1080/00221325.1976.10533980 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221325.1976.10533980
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
Downloaded by [Carnegie Mellon University] at 16:01 12 January 2015
Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/ page/terms-and-conditions
The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 1976, 128, 123-135.
SOME COGNITIVE, BEHAVIORAL, AND PERSONALITY CORRELATES OF MATURITY OF MORAL JUDGMENT* * Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley; and California State University at Son Jose
STEPHEN HARRIS,*PAUL MUSSEN,AND ELDREDRUTHERFORD
Downloaded by [Carnegie Mellon University] at 16:01 12 January 2015
SUMMARY This study was designed to test the hypothesis that maturity of moral judgment is related to moral behavior and to certain personality characteristics. The Ss, 33 fifth grade boys (approximately lOY?-years of age), were given the Kohlberg test of moral judgment, and scores on this test were related to a measure of general intelligence, moral conduct as judged by peers (sociometric nominations), honesty in a structured test, and certain personality variables. Maturity of moral judgment was found to be significantly correlated with general cognitive ability (intelligence test performance) and, even with intelligence partialed out, with resistance to temptation, reputation for being concerned with the welfare of others, selfconfidence, and security in social relationships with peers. A. INTRODUCTION While interest in moral development has burgeoned in the last decade, the focus of most research has been primarily on the cognitive aspects of morality-moral judgment and reasoning. Very recently there has been an increase in studies examining relationships between these cognitive aspects and moral conduct or behavior, although there are still relatively few of
* Received in the Editorial Office, Provincetown, Massachusetts, on September 20, 1974. Copyright, 1976, by The Journal Press. This study, conducted at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, United States Public Health Service, under Research Grant HD 01650. The authors wish to express their appreciation to Herbert H. Wong, principal, M i w i n Mose and Richard Whittington, teachers, and the pupils of their fifth grade classes for their cooperation in this investigation. Requests for reprints should be sent to the second author at the address shown at the end of this article. * Now at Community Mental Health Program, Contra Costa County Medical Services, Martinez., California. 123
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these. For example, Kohlberg (6) reported that among children in the sixth grade, maturity of moral judgment, as indexed by scores on his own test, correlated significantly with teacher’s ratings of moral conscientiousness (Y = .46) and fair-mindedness with peers (Y = .54) and with peer ratings of moral character (r = 5 8 ) . Scores on the Kohlberg test of moral maturity have also been found to be moderately and positively related to honesty in a structured “game” in which it was easy to cheat (7). Sixth grade children whose responses showed that their moral decisions were at a principled level (stage 5 or 6 of the Kohlberg test) manifested greater resistance to temptation than those whose responses were at lower moral levels. The study reported in this paper replicates some earlier studies and attempts to extend the findings by examining some other correlates of maturity of moral thinking. Specifically, we investigated the relationships between children’s moral judgment levels, assessed by means of the Kohlberg test, and the following variables: general intelligence, moral conduct as judged by reputation with peers (sociometric nominations), honesty in a school “test”, and certain aspects of adjustment measured by personality scales.
B . METHODS 1. Subjects Thirty-three boys in two fifth grade classes of an elementary school served as Ss. They ranged in age from 10 years to 11 years, 2 months with a mean of 10 years, 6 months. All of them were of normal intelligence and came from lower-middle or upper-lower class families. 2.
General Procedure
The Ss participated in four sessions. During the first, a group session conducted during a class period, each S completed a self-concept scale and a sociometric questionnaire. a . Sociometric measures. The sociometric questionnaire was the source of data on moral behavior in everyday social interactions. It consisted of 20 items, most of them dealing with conformity to rules, honesty, generosity, and helpfulness. The following items are examples: Which boys are willing to share things with other children? Which boys are most likely to follow the rules even when the teacher is not around? Which boys would never copy another.person’s answers on a test? Which boys try to help someone who has gotten hurt? Each boy was given a list of the names of all the boys
Downloaded by [Carnegie Mellon University] at 16:01 12 January 2015
STEPHEN HARRIS,
et d.
125
in his class and instructed to nominate, for each item, the three who “are most likely to do what the question says.” The S’s score on each sociometric item was the number of nominations he received from classmates divided by the number of possible nominations (i.e., the number of boys in that class). Thus, the S’s scores in the sociometric items indicate his reputation with his same sex peers. The assumption underlying the use of sociometric criteria of moral behavior is that since children interact with one another frequently and in many different kinds of situations, they are likely to be good judges of one another’s conduct and habitual modes of reacting. In fact, it might be argued that peers make more extensive, and perhaps intensive, observations of another child’s moral behavior than teachers do, and their observations are probably relatively freer of halo effects related to the child’s academic performance. For these reasons, peers’ evaluations of a child’s moral actions may be more accurate and meaningful than teachers’ ratings of these qualities. As anticipated, scores on the 20 sociometric items were found to be highly intercorrelated. The matrix of intercorrelations was then subjected to factor analyses by the principal components method, the factors being rotated by Kaiser’s Varimax criterion (5). These analyses yielded an Honesty factor and an Altruism (generosity or consideration of others) factor. Scores for these factors were derived for each S by selecting the items that had the highest loading on each of these factors and summing his standard scores for these items. The Honesty factor score was based on scores for the following four items: Which ones would never copy another person’s answers on a test? Which boys are most likely to follow the rules even when the teacher is not around? Which boys would never lie to the teacher? Which boys would never try to get out of school by pretending to be sick? The Altruism factor scores were derived from these four items: Which boys will stick up for some kid that others are teasing or talking about? Which boys would bawl someone out for hurting another child? Which boys always try to break up an unfair fight? Which ones will try to tell the teacher what really happened if the teacher is scolding a child for something he didn’t do? b. Personality tests. The self-concept scale consisted of 70 statements adapted from Coopersmith (1) by Perkins and Shannon (9), who rephrased some of the original items and added others. Each S was instructed to read each statement and to indicate by a checkmark whether the statement described him “most of the time,” “sometimes,” or “hardly ever.” Half the
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items were stated in a positive form and half in a negative way. The 70 items were grouped into four categories or subscales: 13 dealt with adjustment to parents (e.g., My parents consider my feelings. My parents expect too much of me.); 12 with adjustment to peers (e.g., I am popular with kids my own age. Kids pick on me.); eight with school adjustment (e.g., I am proud of my school work. I feel upset in school.); and 36 with self-esteem or self-conjidence (e.g., I am easy to like. I am pretty happy. I feel like I am a failure. ). With these data, it was possible to examine relationships between measures of moral behavior and personal adjustment, including both specific problems (indicated by responses to individual items) and broad areas of adjustment (measured by subscale scores; i.e., total scores based on all items of a subscale, such as adjustment to peers). A week after the Ss had completed the self-concept and sociometric questionnaires a research worker returned for the second session, a groupadministered resistance-to-temptation task based on the “duplicating technique” of Hartshorne and May (3). Seated in their usual places in their own classroom, the Ss were told by the examiner that they would be given two tests, one a test of word-meaning, the other of arithmetic. It was explained that this was an aspect of a University research study of the abilities of fifth graders. Confidentiality of the results was assured; no one’s scores would be reported to the teacher or to the school. The tests and IBM answer sheets were then distributed and the Ss were given instructions about how to mark their answers to the multiple-choice questions on the tests. The word-meaning and arithmetic tests contained 30 items each, taken from old forms of the Stanford Achievement Test that are not in current use. Both answer sheets were collected a t the completion of the testing session, and although the Ss were not aware of it, the answers marked by each child were copied by the investigators. One week after this testing session, the investigator who had administered the test visited the school again (the Ss’ third session), ostensibly to administer further tests. Ss were informed that because of work pressures, the investigator had not had time to correct the tests and he would appreciate their helping him by correcting their own papers. Each S’s two anwer sheets were returned to him, together with answer keys for the tests, and he was asked to mark his incorrect answers with an “X” and to record the number of his correct answers on each test. The sheets were then returned to the investigator who compared this record with the f ’s original responses.
Downloaded by [Carnegie Mellon University] at 16:01 12 January 2015
STEPHEN HARRIS,
et al.
127
Cheating could occur in several ways: incorrect items could be erased and remarked; items that had been left unanswered could be marked; incorrect answers might not be marked by an X; or total score could be reported incorrectly. The fourth testing session took place approximately a week after completion of the duplicating technique. At this time, the nine-story Kohlberg moral judgment test was administered to each S in an individual session. In order to minimize the possibility that Ss would perceive any connection between this test and the techniques administered in earlier sessions, the moral judgment test was administered by a researcher whom the children had not previously met. Two researchers, trained in a workshop conducted by Professor Kohlberg, used the stage-weighted system in scoring the Kohlberg test. The measure of intelligence used in this study was the vocabulary (word-meaning) score originally obtained in the duplicating technique procedure, the resistance-to-temptation measure. These vocabulary scores based on items taken from the Stanford Achievement Test, were very highly correlated with the Henmon-Nelson Intelligence Test scores (r = .86),which were available for 31 of the Ss. Clearly, this vocabulary score is an excellent gauge of general intelligence as ordinarily measured. The intelligence measure served two purposes in this research. First, it permitted a further direct check on Kohlberg’s assertion (6) that moral development is related to general cognitive development. Second, intelligence test performance has been shown to be significantly related to several of the major measures used in this study-to moral maturity as measured by the Kohlberg scale (6), to resistance-to-temptation (3), and to sociometric status of popularity. The focus of this investigation, however, was on the relationship between moral judgment and moral conduct, over and above any relationships attributable to intelligence alone. The scores on the word-meaning test permitted us to partial out or eliminate the possible influence of intelligence on these correlations. C.
RESULTS
The correlation between the Kohlberg tests of moral judgment and intelligence as measured by vocabulary score, for the 10-year-olds in this study, was .52 (p =
