Lawrence Kohlberg
| Lawrence Kohlberg | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 25, 1927 Bronxville, New York |
| Died | January 19, 1987 (aged 59) Winthrop, Massachusetts Suicide |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago (earned bachelor's degree in one year) |
| Known for | Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development |
Lawrence Kohlberg (/ˈkoʊlbərɡ/; October 25, 1927 – January 19, 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 twenty-five years earlier. 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.
Lawrence Kohlberg was born in Bronxville, New York. He was the youngest of four children of Alfred Kohlberg, a Jewish German entrepreneur, and of his second wife, Charlotte Albrecht, a Christian German chemist. His parents separated when he was four years old and divorced finally when he was fourteen. From 1933 to 1938, Lawrence and his three other siblings rotated between their mother and father for six months at a time. In 1938 this rotating custody of the Kohlberg children was ended, allowing the children to choose the parent with whom they wanted to live. Kohlberg attended high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, which was an elite preparatory school. Kohlberg served in the Merchant Marine at the end of World War II. He worked for a time with the Haganah on a ship smuggling Jewish refugees from Romania through the British Blockade, into Palestine. Captured by the British and held at an internment camp on Cyprus, Kohlberg escaped with fellow crew members. Kohlberg was in Palestine during the fighting in 1948 to establish the state of Israel, but refused to participate and focused on nonviolent forms of activism. He also lived in an Israeli kibbutz during this time, until he was able to return to America in 1948. In the same year he enrolled at the University of Chicago. At this time at Chicago it was possible to gain credit for courses by examination, and Kohlberg earned his bachelor's degree in one year, 1948. He then began study for his doctoral degree in psychology, which he completed at Chicago in 1958. In those early years he read Piaget's work. Kohlberg found a scholarly approach that gave a central place to the individual's reasoning in moral decision making. At the time this contrasted with the current psychological approaches of behaviorism and psychoanalysis that explained morality as simple internalization of external cultural or parental rules, through teaching using reinforcement and punishment or identification with a parental authority.
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