Moral judgment development across cultures: Revisiting Kohlberg’s universality claims

This article revisits Kohlberg’s cognitive developmental claims that stages of moral judgment, facilitative processes of social perspective-taking, and moral values are commonly identifiable across cultures. Snarey [Snarey, J. (1985). The cross-cultural universality of social-moral development: A critical review of Kohlbergian research. Psychological Bulletin, 97, 202–232] examined Kohlberg’s claims in a survey of 45 cross-cultural studies in 27 countries that used Kohlberg’s dilemma method of stage assessment (the Moral Judgment Interview, MJI [Colby, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1987). The measurement of moral judgment: Vol. 1. Theoretical foundations and research validation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press]). Snarey’s review identified a basic stage trend but also the cultural specificity of Kohlberg’s highest stages. As a remedy, Snarey proposed a culturally inclusive elaboration of the highest stages. Another proposed model [Gibbs, J. C. (2003). Moral development and reality: Beyond the theories of Kohlberg and Hoffman. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage] argued for maturity in the basic moral judgment stage trend. Gibbs’ revisionist model has been associated with an alternative (dilemma-free) assessment method (the Sociomoral Reflection Measure-Short Form, SRM-SF [Gibbs, J. C., Basinger, K. S., & Fuller, D. (1992). Moral maturity: Measuring the development of sociomoral reflection. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum]). Snarey’s and Gibbs’s revisionist models are compared and used as frameworks for interpreting not only the MJI findings but also newer SRM-SF findings from 75 cross-cultural studies conducted in 23 countries. Despite continuing questions for research, multimethod convergence is found for common moral values, basic moral judgment stage development, and related social perspective-taking across cultural groups.