Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [255]
Kohlberg stoically endured these and other criticisms and assaults, some of which he agreed with (and changed his scoring accordingly), and some of which he quietly rebutted with new data and arguments. He also suffered the failure of two dreams he had devoted much time and energy to. One was a pilot project to raise the moral thinking of prisoners to Stage 4 through discussions of moral dilemmas, the other an attempt to do much the same thing with troubled teenagers. (The results were encouraging, but the project failed to spread beyond a few schools in Cambridge and New York.)
Added to these strains and disappointments was a severe recurrence of his chronic parasitic infection, causing him racking stomach and intestinal pain. Kohlberg, nearing sixty, became deeply depressed. He had discussed the moral dilemma of suicide with a close friend, to whom he said that if one had important responsibilities to others, one ought to go on. But the battle became too much for him. On January 17, 1987, his car was found parked beside a tidal marsh of Boston Harbor, and three months later his body washed up at Logan Airport. In a loving memorial tribute in the Harvard Gazette of December 15, 1989, three eminent psychologists (Carol Gilligan was one of them) summed up his contribution: “[Larry] almost single-handedly established moral development as a central concern of developmental psychology.” He would have been gratified to hear that; what would have gratified him even more was that by the late 1990s, well over a hundred cross-cultural studies had confirmed that the development of moral reasoning in the stages set forth by Kohlberg does appear to be a cultural universal.101
Kohlberg revisionists do not disagree with his general theory so much as they modify it to accommodate their own empirical data.* Dennis Krebs is one who has done so. Although Krebs greatly admired Kohlberg, with whom he became acquainted at Harvard, he and colleague Kathy Denton published a study in 1990 demonstrating that whatever moral level people reason at when considering Kohlberg dilemmas, in situations in their own lives they are apt to reason at a lower level.102
The study is noteworthy because, unlike most other moral development research, it is based not only on a test but on a real-life situation. Kathy Denton went to bars, nightclubs, and parties and asked drinkers to take part in a study on “the effects of alcohol on judgment.” Volunteers—she collected forty in all—were interviewed then and there about two Kohlberg dilemmas, answered questions about the morality of driving when impaired (should you drive at all if impaired? if you are impaired but don’t feel drunk? if you take particular care?), and took a Breathalyzer test. In a follow-up session at the university, the same people were interviewed about two other Kohlberg dilemmas, and were asked how they got home the night of the first interview.
Denton and Krebs found that people scored higher in moral development at the university than they had when drinking; in fact, the higher their blood alcohol level at the first interview, the lower their moral judgment score. Worse, when they were sober they judged it morally wrong to drive when impaired and said that they themselves would not do so, but when they were drinking they took a less firm moral stand. Indeed, all but one drove home on the night they were first interviewed, no matter how impaired they were.
This is only one example of Krebs’s effort to measure moral development