Lawrence Kohlberg

Life & Legacy

Lawrence Kohlberg (; October 25, 1927 – January 17, 1987) was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development.
He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget's account of children's moral development from 25 years earlier. He proposed that moral reasoning develops through six identifiable stages, grouped into three levels: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional, described in his framework of stages of moral development. His research showed that these stages appear in a fixed developmental sequence and reflect the increasing complexity of how people justify moral choices. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg's work reflected and extended not only Piaget's findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin. At the same time he was creating a new field within psychology: "moral development".
In an empirical study using six criteria, such as citations and recognition, Kohlberg was found to be the 30th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.