You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 9 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
The developmental theme of moral development is examined in OCR H567 through a pair of studies — the classic Kohlberg (1968) and the contemporary Lee et al. (1997) — and, as with the external-influences pair, Component 02 will ask you not merely to know each study but to compare them and to judge how far the newer study changes our understanding of the theme, including what it reveals about individual, social and cultural diversity. This pair is in some ways the richest on the developmental course, because the two studies are not simply different in method — they make claims that stand in genuine tension: Kohlberg argues that moral development is fundamentally universal, following one sequence everywhere, while Lee provides direct evidence that at least some moral judgements are culturally variable. Comparing them is therefore not a mechanical exercise but a real intellectual contest, and the best answers engage with that contest rather than just tabulating features.
This lesson is built around the comparison skill. It sets out the shared foundation of the two studies (both belong to the moral-development theme, both study how children's moral thinking develops), then works systematically through their similarities and differences — of claim, method, data, focus and cultural stance. It then addresses the higher-order question: how far does Lee update the theme, and how does the pair illuminate diversity — with cultural diversity here taking centre stage, since it is the very thing the two studies disagree about. It closes with a fully worked comparison-style specimen question. The comparison structure practised in the external-influences pair lesson applies again here; this lesson deepens it on a pair whose disagreement is sharper.
| This lesson covers | OCR H567 Component 02 element | AO focus |
|---|---|---|
| The shared foundation of the two moral-development studies | Section A — Developmental; theme: moral development (the pair) | AO1 knowledge |
| Systematic similarities between Kohlberg and Lee | Section A — Core studies (comparison) | AO1; AO3 |
| Systematic differences between Kohlberg and Lee | Section A — Core studies (comparison) | AO1; AO3 |
| How far Lee (contemporary) updates our understanding of the theme | Section B — Areas, perspectives, debates | AO3 evaluation |
| What the pair reveals about individual, social and cultural diversity | Section B — debates; diversity | AO2; AO3 |
The specification is referenced descriptively; consult the official OCR H567 specification document for its exact published wording. This lesson develops AO1 (accurate recall of both studies as the basis for comparison), AO2 (relating the studies to diversity and novel moral judgements) and, above all, AO3 (the structured comparison and the judgement about universality versus cultural variation).
Before drawing the contrasts, establish what the two studies have in common, because a strong comparison locates the differences within a shared frame rather than treating the studies as unrelated. Kohlberg and Lee are paired for good reasons.
Both belong to the developmental theme of moral development: each investigates how children's moral thinking — not their behaviour, but their judgements and reasoning about right and wrong — develops across childhood. Both treat moral development as something that unfolds over time as the child grows, rather than as a fixed adult trait. Both use children of a range of ages, precisely so that development (change with age) can be observed: Kohlberg longitudinally across a wide age span, Lee cross-sectionally across three age bands. Both, in their different ways, connect moral development to broader forces — Kohlberg to cognitive maturation and perspective-taking, Lee to cultural socialisation. And both study moral judgement through structured tasks (dilemmas; story-and-rating) rather than by observing real moral behaviour. This shared ground — how children's moral thinking develops with age — is the reason the two studies define the theme between them.
It is worth dwelling on the significance of the fact that both studies use hypothetical materials rather than real moral situations, because it is a shared feature that carries a shared limitation. Kohlberg asks people to reason about the fictional Heinz; Lee asks children to rate fictional characters in story vignettes. In neither case is the child facing a real moral choice with real stakes, real temptation or real consequences. This matters because there is good reason to think that reasoning about morality in the calm of an interview or a story-rating task may diverge from how a person actually judges and behaves when a genuine moral situation confronts them. A child might rate a cover-up lie as very naughty in a story yet tell exactly such a lie themselves under pressure; an adult might reason at a high stage about Heinz yet act at a much lower one when their own interests are threatened. So both studies, for all their differences, share a question mark over their ecological validity — the extent to which judgements about hypothetical scenarios predict real moral cognition and conduct. Recognising this shared weakness is itself a comparison point: it is a respect in which the contemporary study did not improve on the classic one, since Lee inherited the hypothetical-task limitation rather than solving it.
A second shared feature worth noting is that both studies, despite their contrasting conclusions, are fundamentally constructivist rather than nativist: neither treats morality as simply given at birth. Kohlberg sees moral reasoning as built stage by stage through the child's active engagement with social and moral problems; Lee sees moral evaluation as acquired through immersion in a culture's values. So although they disagree about universality, they agree about something deeper — that moral thinking is developed, through the child's interaction with the social world, rather than innately fixed. This shared constructivism is part of why they belong to the same theme, and it is a more interesting similarity to state than the surface fact that both use children.
| Dimension | Shared feature |
|---|---|
| Theme | Both address moral development — how children's moral thinking develops |
| What is studied | Both study moral judgement/reasoning, not moral behaviour |
| Developmental focus | Both use children of different ages to capture change over time |
| Method type | Both use structured, hypothetical tasks (dilemmas; story vignettes) rather than real moral situations |
| Constructivist leaning | Both see moral thinking as developing through the child's engagement with the social world, not simply innate |
| Cross-cultural element | Both include more than one culture (Kohlberg across several; Lee comparing two) |
The most important similarity to state explicitly is that both study the development of moral judgement using hypothetical tasks with children of different ages — and, notably, both engage with culture (Kohlberg by testing his sequence cross-culturally; Lee by making culture the central variable). That shared cross-cultural dimension is what makes their disagreement about universality so pointed: they are not talking past each other, but reaching different conclusions from overlapping evidence.
The differences are where the comparison earns its marks, and for this pair the central difference is a genuine clash of claims, not just of method.
| Dimension | Kohlberg (1968) | Lee et al. (1997) |
|---|---|---|
| Central claim | Moral development is universal — one invariant stage sequence for all | Moral evaluation is culturally variable — cultures judge some acts differently |
| What develops | The structure of moral reasoning (stages/levels) | The evaluation of specific acts (lying/truth-telling) |
| Method | Longitudinal (+ cross-cultural) interview | Cross-cultural, independent-measures, story-and-rating task |
| Data | Qualitative reasoning (rich justifications) | Quantitative ratings (goodness/naughtiness scores) |
| What is measured | Why a person judges as they do (reasoning) | How good/bad an act is judged (rating), not the reasoning |
| Role of culture | Culture is a test of a universal sequence (and the sequence largely holds) | Culture is the cause of the difference (and it drives divergence) |
| Sample | ~72 Chicago boys (+ cross-cultural groups) | ~228 Chinese and Canadian boys and girls |
| Era & stance | 1968; universalist, cognitive-developmental | 1997; culturally comparative, socialisation-focused |
| Headline finding | An invariant, universal stage sequence | Cultural divergence on pro-social lies, growing with age |
Two differences deserve special emphasis. The first is the clash of claims about universality: Kohlberg's whole theory rests on the sequence being the same everywhere, while Lee's whole result is that the evaluation of certain acts differs between cultures. This is the beating heart of the comparison, and a top-band answer makes it central. The second is the difference in what each study actually measured, which turns out to soften the clash: Kohlberg measured the structure of reasoning (the form of a person's justifications), whereas Lee measured the evaluation of acts (a rating of good or bad). Because these are different things, the two studies can both be right: it is entirely possible that the underlying capacity and sequence of moral reasoning is universal (Kohlberg) while the content and evaluation that reasoning is applied to is culturally shaped (Lee). Grasping that the two studies target different levels of moral development — structure versus content — is the single most sophisticated point available on this pair, because it dissolves an apparent contradiction into a division of labour.
The difference in data type is also more consequential than it first appears, and it connects to the studies' contrasting strengths. Kohlberg's qualitative interview data — the actual reasoning people gave — is rich and revealing, capturing the why behind a judgement, but it is difficult and subjective to score, which is the source of his reliability worries. Lee's quantitative rating data is thin by comparison — a number on a scale, with no record of the child's reasoning — but it is objective and easy to compare across cultures, ages and conditions, which is exactly what a cross-cultural comparison needs. So the studies made opposite trade-offs on the depth-versus-comparability axis: Kohlberg chose depth (and paid in reliability), Lee chose comparability (and paid in depth). This is not a coincidence but a consequence of their aims: to study the structure of reasoning you need rich qualitative material, whereas to compare cultures cleanly you need standardised quantitative measures. Once again a difference in method flows directly from a difference in question — and pointing that out turns a list of contrasts into an explanation of them.
There is one further asymmetry worth flagging, concerning sex of sample, because it cuts against the usual assumption that the older study is the more limited. Kohlberg's original sample was all male, a notorious weakness that opened his theory to Gilligan's charge of androcentrism. Lee's samples, by contrast, included both boys and girls. So on this particular dimension the contemporary study is unambiguously the better designed, and a comparison can note that Lee not only addresses cultural bias but also avoids the sex bias that dogs the classic study. This is a small but precise point that shows genuine command of both studies rather than a vague sense that "the newer one is more modern".
As with the other pair, this must be answered with a judgement, and here the judgement is unusually interesting because Lee does not merely extend the theme (as Chaney extended external influences) — it challenges a central claim of the classic study.
Where Lee genuinely updates the theme. In three ways Lee substantially advances our understanding. First, and most importantly, it challenges the strong universality claim: by demonstrating that children in different cultures evaluate the same acts (modest lies) differently, and increasingly so with age, Lee provides direct empirical evidence that at least part of moral development is culturally variable and learned — something Kohlberg's framework, with its emphasis on a universal sequence, tends to understate. Second, it shifts attention from reasoning-structure to cultural content, showing that what children judge to be good or bad, not just how they reason, is a proper object of moral-development research. Third, it improves the cultural even-handedness of the field: by comparing a non-Western culture directly with a Western one and taking Chinese values (modesty) seriously on their own terms, Lee helps correct the ethnocentrism latent in a theory whose highest stages are defined in Western, individualistic terms.
Where Lee does not overturn the classic study. Against this, Lee does not — and does not claim to — refute Kohlberg wholesale. It studies a narrow moral judgement (lying and truth-telling), not the whole architecture of moral reasoning, so it cannot show that Kohlberg's stage sequence is wrong. Indeed the two cultures agreed about anti-social acts, which is consistent with there being some universal moral ground beneath the cultural variation. And because Lee measures evaluations rather than reasoning, it does not directly test Kohlberg's central object of study at all. So Lee complicates and enriches the theme rather than demolishing the classic account.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 9 lessons in this course.