Some psychologists devote their lives to studying the changes people go through throughout their lifetime. This branch of psychology is called Developmental Psychology- the study of how our behavior and thoughts change over time. I like to think of Developmental Psychology as the study of humans womb to tomb (cute eh?).
Before we delve into the inner workings of developmental psychology I would like to discuss two things.
First, we will use this unit to try to answer one of the major themes in psychology called the nature vs. nurture argument. Nature is the idea that your behaviors, thoughts and traits come from our genetics (we are born with them). Nurture is the idea that our behaviors come from our environment (we learn them from our surroundings). My best friends Rob and Rob both twirl their hair. They have both been doing it for years (Rob A had a bald spot in the back of his head, Rob G in the front). If you were a proponent of nurture, you would say that they both had similar stresses, friends and family structure that shaped them into becoming hair twirlers. You would also think that if raised in a different environment, say the South Bronx, hair twirling might not be their habit of choice. But if you were a proponent of nature, you would believe that regardless of where the Robs live, they would twirl their hair , because the hair twirling trait is in their genes.
Most of us like to believe Nurture is the more important factor in our development. We like to believe that if we try hard enough we can do anything we want to do (a nurture idea). But Nature does put serious restrictions on our development. Lets say my father wanted me to play Center for the New York Knicks. He hires Pat Riley and Mike Krzyzewski (famous basketball coaches) to start training me at 4 years old.
The second issue I want to discuss before we begin is how we study developmental psychology.
Twins are the best way to study the issue of nature vs. nurture.
Think about it, if we have a set of identical twins (we will discuss what that is soon- but just know they are two people with almost exactly the same genetic makeup) and one is raised in New Braunfels by wealthy Christian parents, the other in Moscow by poor out of work clowns- how similar will the twins be?
If they are very similar, nature scores points, if not, nurture takes the cake.
That said, most studies in developmental psychology are either cross-sectional or longitudinal.
Lets say I wanted to see at what age are people the best at playing Halo (if you do not know what Halo is, you have bigger issues than this course).
I could go about doing this in two ways. If I wanted to do a cross-sectional study I could take ten 5 year olds, ten 10 year olds, ten 15 year olds, and ten 20 year olds, have them all play Halo and see which group lasted the longest. This would be a fast and easy way to do the study and MOST studies are done just like this.
But if I wanted to do a longitudinal study I would take ten five year olds, have them play halo, wait five years and test them again, wait five more years and test them again, them test them again at twenty and I would have my study. This type of research is much more rare simply because it takes so freaking long!!!!
I am going to break developmental psychology down into FOUR sections or types of development.
Physical development pretty much starts the same way for all of us. Our Dad takes our Mom out for a nice dinner and movie, maybe they go dancing, they get back to the house, he puts on some of Marvin Gaye's Lets Get it On or anything by Barry White....lets just end that right there.
What you should probably know about that experience is that you are here because of chromosomes (and Barry White). Chromosomes are like books that gives instructions for what the body should do. If chromosomes are the books then the pages that make up the book are called DNA. To go further- pages are made up of words and in this messed up analogy, the words would be genes and the letters that make up the words would be called nucleotides. If that whole book analogy made no sense then here it is in plain English - Chromosomes are made up of DNA which are made up of genes which are made of of nucleotides. Do you have to know what each piece does- no- but know the order and the fact that they are blueprints to who you are.
Lets get back to Mom and Dad and Marvin Gaye (for those of you who have no idea who Marvin Gay or Barry White are- good for you- you are too young- if a guy every starts playing Barry White - run!!!). Every cell in your parent's body has 46 chromosomes (23pairs) except for two types of cells- sex cells- your Pop's sperm and your Mom's eggs only have 23 chromosomes. When the sperm rams into the egg they form 46 chromosomes- which was you. This newly formed you is called a zygote- the first cells of conception
Things that can go wrong in the womb
Unfortunately, there are many things that can go wrong when a baby is developing in the womb or prenatal environment. You have a placenta that acts as a filter to the fetus, but sometimes dangerous chemicals can travel through the placenta and harm the child. These agents, whether they are cigarette smoking, drugs or alcohol are called as a group; teratogens. A teratogen is any chemical agent that can cause harm to the prenatal environment. The most common teratogen is alcohol and can sometimes cause FAS (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome) characterized by mental retardation and some skull abnormalities.
Another issue that can effect a baby are chromosomal abnormalities. For example, our gender is determined by the twenty third pair of chromosomes (a man's sperm carries an X or Y and a woman's egg has just an X). If the male gives an X, we have a girl, a Y we have a boy. Sometimes a baby is born with just a single X chromosome resulting in Turner's syndrome (shortness, webbed neck and unusual sexual development).
Babies born with an extra X (XXY) have Klinefelter's syndrome (minimal sexual development and extreme introversion).
Other chromosomal abnormalities cause mental retardation like Down's syndrome (rounded face, shorter fingers, eyes wider apart, low cognitive ability) caused by an extra chromosome on the twenty-first pair.
It used to be that babies were believed to be born as a blank slates- like empty pages just waiting to be written upon (the ultimate nurture perspective). But we now know that we are born with some basic programming- called reflexes. The following five reflexes you should know for the AP or just to mess with your baby brother or sister.
Now if your math teacher sticks their finger in your mouth, are you going to begin sucking?
Probably not, because reflexes go away with brain development. Also note that these reflexes are different then the ones you have when you touch a burning pot (I will address these types later).
The Newborn's Development
When healthy babies are born, they also are born with certain preferences for sweet foods (for me that never went away) and are attracted to human voices and humanlike faces as soon as they emerge from the birth canal. Now babies are born legally blind and can only see 8-12 inches from their face (which is about the distance from the baby to the mother's face when breast feeding).
baby's physical development (ours too) is called maturation. Maturation is our physical develop that occurs regardless of the environment around you (you cannot really stop growing hair in you armpits no matter where you live or how much education you have). Essentially the order of our maturation is always the same throughout our lives, but timing varies greatly.
What I am trying to say is that we will all learn to sit up before walking, but some of us will walk at 9 months, others at 16 months (12 is the average). Think about a female's breast development. All girls when they hit puberty will begin to develop breasts, but the timing varies. There is always that one girl that develop breasts about a year before anyone else. Back at Osborn school in Rye- that girl was named Karen. We used to snap her bra all the time and really make fun of her. I still feel kinda bad, but she would make fun of my stutter, so I guess that makes us even.
Physical Development- Adolescence (that period of time in between childhood and adulthood where the zits come out)
The next major changes your body undertakes occurs during puberty (the period of sexual maturation where people become capable of reproducing). Yep, right now you are going through puberty and your bodies are telling you to go out and make babies (but that would probably be unwise at this juncture because a baby would really get in the way of studying for the AP exam- all those smelly diapers).
I am not going to delve that deeply into puberty (that is what health class and late night cable TV is for), but rather the changes that you are experiencing fall under two major categories.
Physical Development- Adulthood
After puberty, physical development losing its excitement. The good news is that your senses (like vision, hearing and smell) tend to peak around the age of 27. The bad news is that after your 20's everything begins to deteriorate. Slowly at first, but around the early 60s, you see a RAPID decline in the senses. The one major physical milestone in adulthood is menopause, which is when a woman stops releasing eggs, thus stops having their periods. Men will never experience anything like menopause- we can go on producing sperm until the day we die.
A common problem we see today in aging adults is Alzheimer’s Disease (a progressive and irreversible brain disorder characterized by gradual deterioration of memory, language and physical functioning). We are not sure of what causes Alzheimer’s Disease but we know it is linked to the deterioration of a natural chemical that our body produces called Acetylcholine (ACH for short). Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter that you will learn a lot about when we go over neuroscience (aren't you just so excited!!!).
Physically, the story always ends the same way- we die.
Psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross said we go through 5 stages before dying (unless you fall into a tree shredder and death happens way to quick to think about. This is not really physical development, but I could not think of any other place to put it and I might as well write it down while I remember it.
Social Development
Social development begins the minute you enter the world. Psychologists have identified periods of our lives that development MUST be healthy or they will not develop correctly- these times are called Critical Periods. The first few months of life are a critical period for social development. The focal issue for the infant is to develop is attachment- a reciprocal relationship between child and caregiver (usually a parent).
Some animals develop attachment through the process of imprinting. Scientist Konrad Lorenz showed us baby ducklings would develop an immediate strong attachment with the first object it sees moving. This object is hopefully the duckling's mother, but Lorenz imprinted ducklings to humans, dogs and even balls.
Harry Harlow proved to us that touch is critical for higher level mammals (like most of you) to develop attachment. He separated them from their mothers and used a wire mother- covered in soft cloth- with a nipple with milk- as a mother substitute for the baby.
One day a baby monkey took a poop on the fake mother and Harlow had to wash the cloth. The baby monkey freaked out with the wire monkey without the soft cloth. So Harlow wanted to see if the cloth was really that important. He put baby monkeys into cages with two mothers- one with a soft cloth and no food, one a hard wire mesh with a nipple that provided food. To everyone's astonishment, the baby stayed with the cloth mother all day and ignored the one with food. Even when hungry the baby would quickly reach across, take some food, but run back to the soft mother.
Thus, it was discovered that soft touch is critical for monkeys to develop attachment. Further studies have been done with humans in orphanages. Some orphans were touched daily (good touch not bad touch), with some stroking on the head, while other orphans were fed but never touched. The ones that were never touched became socially isolated and when tested 12 years later, had lower IQs than the ones that were touched. Yes, this was a cruel experiment.
Years later, psychologist Mary Ainsworth, labeled the various types of attachments humans can have with their parents. She set up an experiment called Ainsworth's Stranger Paradigm (I still have no clue what a paradigm really is). She placed young children into rooms that they had never been in before and then asked their parents to quietly go out the door.
After observing how the child reacts with the parent away, she asked the parents to come back in the room and observed how the child reacted to their mom or dad's return. She discovered three main types of attachment.
* On a little side note about attachment, at around a year old most children develop what most psychologists call stranger anxiety, which is distress young children feel when they are around people they are unfamiliar with. Stranger anxiety makes alot of sense from an evolutionary perspective. What happens when kids turn one? They begin to walk- they become mobile. Way back in the cave man days, those kids that did not develop stranger anxiety by the time they walked, might have just wandered off with some Cro-Magnon pedophile and died. Those that had the anxiety lived long enough to procreate (have kids) and that trait was eventually passed on to you.
Parenting Styles
Do you think your parents have in any way affected your social development? Think about the following 3 types of parenting styles and see if you can identify traits of your parents within them:
Authoritative Parents: have consistent standards for the child's behavior, but the rules are reasonable and explained. Encourage the child's independence, but not to the point where the rules are broken. They praise as often as they punish, and often let the children help make the rules.
Stage theorists and Social Development
We already learned that the nature v nurture argument is a big one in psychology. Another big controversy is an argument called continuity v discontinuity.
Do we develop continually, at a steady rate throughout our lives, or is development discontinuous, marked by periods of rapid development along with periods of stagnation. If you think about it, some development is continuous, like my ability to play Madden football on my PS3- I always get a little better at it as I practice. But other development is discontinuous, like riding a bike. You tend to fall off again and again until one day, you just get it. The psychologists we are going to talk about believe in discontinuous growth, so we develop socially kinda like riding a bike, we struggle, until one day we just change.
Sigmund Freud
Freud (his friends called him Siggy) is probably the most recognizable psychologist of all time. He is the father of the psychoanalytic school of psychology and we WILL discuss him in MUCH more detail when we discuss the psychoanalytic school. But Freud did talk about social development and stated that all of us go through what he called five psychosexual stages.
Now when you think about sex, you think about using your genitals for stimulation, rated R, late night Cinamax sex. However to Freud, sex was a concept that explained how we get our pleasure from the world. For most of you, although your parents would hate to think about it, your sexual pleasure comes from your genitals. But to younger children they do not. Freud believed that we all have a libido, or instinctual sexual energy.
Go Ahead- work that libido!!!! |
Your libido changes throughout your lifetime, focusing on different parts of your body. Essentially, your libido has 4 stages of metamorphosis. If some outside force deters our social development in one of the following stages, Freud said we could become fixated in that stage, meaning that we would become preoccupied with that earlier stage later on in our lives. Lets explain the stages and see if we can get this to make some sense.
1.Oral Stage: About 0-2 years old, an infants libido is focused around their mouth. You will notice that babies see the world through their mouths. If I give my 8 month old son some dog vomit, the first thing he will do is taste it. Freud believe that if you become fixated in the oral stage than you may overeat, smoke, or just have a childhood dependence on things.
2. Anal Stage: About 2-4 years old, the child becomes focused on controlling bowel movements (crapping). The libido is focused on holding in and releasing defecation (poo poo). This usually occurs during toilet training. The child meets the conflict between the parent's demands and the child's desires and physical capabilities in one of two ways: Either he puts up a fight or he simply refuses to go. The child who wants to fight takes pleasure in excreting maliciously, perhaps just before or just after being placed on the toilet. If the parents are too lenient and the child manages to derive pleasure and success from this expulsion, it will result in the formation of an anal expulsive character. This character is generally messy, disorganized, reckless, careless, and defiant. Conversely, a child may opt to retain feces, thereby spiting his parents while enjoying the pleasurable pressure of the built-up feces on his intestine. If this tactic succeeds and the child is overindulged, he will develop into an anal retentive character. This character is neat, precise, orderly, careful, stingy, withholding, obstinate, meticulous, and passive-aggressive. The resolution of the anal stage, proper toilet training, permanently affects the individual propensities to possession and attitudes towards authority.
3. Phallic Stage: About 4-6 years old, the child first realizes his or her gender. In other words, the boy says "look I have an extra finger, Sally where is yours, you freak!!!". The libido is focused on exploring the penis and vagina (playing doctor- I have fond but disturbing memories of a plastic fisher price med kit) but not in the way you now think about playing with your genitals (you pervert).
During this stage Freud believed that boys can develop an Oedipus Complex, where he begins to have sexual feelings towards his mother (not the "Mom, I want to see you in a cute number" feeling, but more like I want to be with you on my phallic stage level).
The girl can develop and Electra Complex, where they want to be with the father. In particular, they develop what Freud called penis envy, or the idea that every woman wants to have a male penis (why did I say male, is there a female penis?).
During these complexes the children often have hateful feelings toward the same sex parent and the stage ends with a "if I can't beat them, I'll join them attitude toward that same sex parent. Now I believe that penis envy has merit, not because I love my penis and think that of course every person would want to have it, but rather, the penis may represent what men have in society and women do not; power.
4. Latency Stage: About 7-11 year olds develop the need to just hang around peers of their own gender. You might as well call this the "cootie stage". Circle circle dot dot now I have my cootie shot. This is the stage when the libido is hidden in the unconscious (this will be a big topic later) and sexuality is repressed (hidden). But the libido makes a grand entrance in the next stage.
5. Genital Stage: From about 12 until death, this is the stage you are probably all in now (if not, don't worry, your time will come). Here the libido,sexual energy, is focused on your genitals and sex is as you think about it now. Freud considers fixation in this stage normal- Congrats!!!!
Now we will be going over Freud a lot more later. Just remember that his theories have some issues. First, he lived in Vienna, Austria (not Australia dumb ass- it is a whole different continent!!!) and he studies himself, his children and rich white woman in Europe. Are their thoughts generalizable to the rest of the global population? Probably not. Next, his theories cannot be tested, so it is hard to consider them true science. But they make for cool conversation and many great ideas came from his wacky drugged out mind (yes he did drugs).
Erik Erikson
First of all, what were his parents thinking, naming him Erik, they must have been real deep people. Erikson came from a group of psychologists that took Fred's ideas and built upon them, called neo-Freudians (thus you can put Erikson in what school of psychology?- Psychoanalytic). Erikson thought Freud was a perv and focused too much on sex. So Erikson came up with his own stages of psychosocial development. Erikson's stage theory has eight stages and within each stage their is a social conflict or battle between two forces in our development.
1. Trust versus mistrust: This stage is all about fulfilling needs. The baby needs to trust the world around them to take take of their needs. If they are hungry, they need to develop trust that they will be fed. If they are not fed, or their diaper is left dirty, they may develop a mistrust in the outside world. This sense of trust of mistrust can effect us throughout the rest of our lives.
2. Autonomy versus same and doubt: Autonomy means being your own boss. Here a toddler tries to control their own bodies by toilet training and their environment, by always saying "NO!!!!". Sometimes they do poopy in their pants or get yelled at by their parents, causing shame and doubt in their own abilities. If we learn how to control ourselves in reasonable ways, we develop a healthy will. We are then able to face the later challenges of life.
3. Initiative versus guilt: Here the key word in a child's life changes from "No!" to why?". In this stage children want to understand the world and they ask too many freakin questions!!!! If their initiative in questioning the world is encouraged, then they will feel comfortable with expressing their curiosity throughout the rest of their life. If we smack them around and tell them to shut up, then they will feel guilty about their questioning and avoid being inquisitive later.
4. Industry versus inferiority: This is where most children begin formal education (what we call school). For the first time children are being formally evaluated. If they raise their hand in class and answer a question correctly. then they will feel industrious (competent). If he tries to answer a question but stutters to get out the wrong answer and Matt Dunn, Nick Adams and Josh Beiber all start making fun of his speech impediment, then he will feel inferior (it still hurts even today).
5. Identity versus role confusion: In adolescence, Erikson believed that a teenagers main social need is to discover his or her social identity. While searching for your identity, you may try out different roles, like trying to fit into various social groups, experimenting with drugs or sex, or just changing your wardrobe. You should be trying to find a stable sense of self now, or Erikson believed you may have an identity crisis later.
6. Intimacy versus isolation: Young adults (early 20s into early 30s) are trying to balance their career efforts (work, school or self-improvement) with the need to be in an intimate relationship with another person. How much time should I spend looking for a relationship? What is I don't find anybody? What if I am all alone for the rest of my life?
7. Generativity versus stagnation: Erikson believed that by the time we reach our mid 30s to mid 50s we start to really examine our lives and see if it is going the way you planned it or did it take a drastic turn. For example, when I was your age, I thought by the time I was 33 (yes- I am 33) I would be traveling around South America with a whip, discovering lost treasuring and meeting new exotic women from village to village. Instead, I live in Rye and teach Social Studies in Harrison, with 3 kids and a big mortgage (I don't even own a whip). This is where some people take drastic steps and change their lives. You will see alot of late divorces or extreme changes in clothes or cars- we call this experience a mid life crisis.
8. Integrity versus despair: Towards the end of our lives we look back and evaluate ourselves. Did we live a good life? Leave behind a legacy of friends or family? Or did we waste our time playing Madden 2023 on Playstation 7? If we feel like there were many lost opportunities along the way we may fall into despair. I like to use this stage to try to shape my life now- you should too.
Piaget's cognitive development theory
Piaget was actually working for Alfred Binet (the inventor of the IQ test, which we will talk about under the intelligence chapter) when he noticed that children tended to answer questions wrong on tests in similar ways. Piaget hypothesized (guessed) that children have different schemas than adults. Ok, what is a schema? This is really kind of important- a schema is a conceptual framework used to solve problems. What the heck does that mean (is heck a bad word)? Think of it this way, we use schemas to make judgments about the world.
When I think about Red Sox fans, I think of backwards illogical people who act rude and do not know that much about baseball history. Thus my schema of Red Sox fans is not very flattering.
The first time my son Jacob saw a dog he pointed and said "wuzzsapagaju" (is Jacob speak that means "what is that"). I tell him that is a dog. He looks at the dog, sees four legs and a tail and thinks to himself- ok a dog.
Now he has a schema for a dog- four legs and a tail. The next week Jacob is hanging out at Landa park and sees what we would call a cat. He says to himself "hmmmm- four legs, a tail- it must be a dog" and he goes on to call it a dog.
This is called assimilation- incorporating new experiences into existing schemas. In fact, every animal he sees that has four legs and a tail, he will probably call a dog- because it fits in his schema of a dog.
Now lets say I tell Caleb that what he sees is really a cat, which looks like a dog, but much smaller. Then Caleb is hanging out at Garden Catering and he sees a lady with a Chihuahua (a small dog).
Jacob sees the dog- thinks - four legs, tail, small- must be a cat. I will then correct him and say that sometimes dogs can be small too.
Jacob will then accommodate (change) his schema for dogs to fit both big and little ones.
Piaget took these ideas on how children think and came up with his own stage theory of cognitive development (don't worry, this unit has 90% of all the stage theorists, so no more memorizing stages after developmental psychology). Just remember, Freud and Erikson were stages of social development- while these are stages of cognitive development.
1. Sensorimotor Stage: (birth to 2)- Babies explore the world strictly through their senses. You learn and develop schemas by senses the world through sight, hearing, touch, smell and most importantly taste. When I give you a quiz on this stuff, are you going to pick up the quiz and taste it?
Hopefully not (unless you hungry hungry hippo hungry) because you are out of this stage. Also during this stage babies do not have what Piaget called object permanence: the realization that objects continue to exist even when you cannot see them. Think about it, why do babies get such a kick out of the pick-a-boo game.
When you hide you face, they actually think it is gone from existence. When you show them the face again, they think you are the cats meow. When babies finally develop object permanence, they enter the next stage.
2. Preoperational Stage: (2-7)- Here babies start using symbols to represent real world objects. The most important development in this stage is speech. During this stage children are egocentric, which means they think the world was created solely for them- and when they sleep the world sleeps too.
Children do NOT yet understand the concepts of conservation in this stage (that is that objects remain the same even when their shapes change). To you eight ounces of water in a short fat cup is the same as eight ounces in a tall thin cup- to this child the amounts are different. Or if I took two pizzas, one dived into 8 slices, one into 4. A child in the preoperational stage would thing that the pizza with 8 slices is more (you should know by now that it makes little difference). But I do notice that when there is a chocolate cake around I tend to take many small pieces instead of one huge one- somehow thinking that I am saving calories.
. Concrete Operational Stage: (8-12) Here they understand the laws of conservation. In this stage the child begins to look at the world more logically and can piece together logic statement- God is love, love is blind, Stevie Wonder is blind thus....Stevie Wonder must be god (not really but you get the point). The child cannot yet think about abstract concepts such as parallel lines, or calculus.
4. Formal Operational Stage: (12-adulthood) Piaget said that not all of us reach this stage. This is where we can manipulate objects in our minds that we have never actually seen. Also, in this stage we can learn to think about the way we think, called metacognition.
Moral Development
How well do you know your own moral compass? (if you don't care, you just answered the question)
Ok be honest with me for a second. If your friend came up to you with a copy of this years AP Psychology examination would you take a peak?
I am not interested in whether you would or would not cheat, rather I am interested in how you came to your decision. This is the study of morality and Lawrence Kohlberg came up with the idea that the reasoning behind our morality changing throughout our lifetime- yes, another stage theorist.
Kohlberg's Stages of Morality
Ok, this is what Kohlberg did: He asked people of different ages to read the famous Heinz Dilemma asked them what they would do and more importantly why.
Ok, this is what Kohlberg did: He asked people of different ages to read the famous Heinz Dilemma asked them what they would do and more importantly why. (and it has nothing to do with ketcup)
In Europe, a woman was near death from cancer. One drug might save her, a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The druggist was charging $2000, ten times what the drug had cost him to make. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could get together only about half of what it should cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or to let him pay later. But the druggist said no. The husband got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife. Should the husband have done that? Why?
1. Preconventional Morality: This morality was exhibited by the youngest children in the study (although I make the argument that many of us use this morality throughout our lifetimes). Preconventional morality is the concept that your morality is linked to getting rewarded and trying to avoid punishment. If you do not cheat on the the AP Exam because you are afraid that you will get caught and punished you are using preconventional morality. The same morality is used when my 6 year old cleans his room because he will get to watch TV- he is cleaning not because he feels some internal sense of moral goodness to clean- but rather, he wants the reward.
If you think Heinz is wrong to steal the drug because he could get punished you are using preconventional morality. If you think Heinz was right to steal the drug because he will be rewarded with his wife's life, then you are still using preconventional morality. It is not about the decision, but rather how you go about reasoning it.
2. Conventional Morality: This is the most common moral stage for teenagers. This is where your morality is based on how you think people will view you. You think to yourselves, "how will my peers view me". If you choose not to cheat on the AP exam because if you get caught your friends will think you are a cheater, you have used conventional morality.
Thus we have the huge cheating problem we face in our educational system today. Most of you (teenagers) emphasis conventional morality because you REALLY care what your peers think of you. Cheating is not looked at as the horrific act it once was- thus many of you would not think any less of a cheater- reinforcing people to cheat even more. If cheating was look at as a "Scarlet Letter", teenagers would rarely cheat.
In the Heinz example, whether you think people will like him and think him a hero or if you think people will think him a criminal, you are using conventional morality.
3. Postconventional Morality: The highest level of morality, here you rely on what some people call universal ethical principles. You believe that there is a absolute right and wrong. So you would cheat or not cheat on the AP Exam depending on what your own personal set of ethics are.
In the Heinz example, you may believe he was justified because a woman's life outweighs the store owner's right of personal property.
Criticisms of Kohlberg
Carol Gilligan is well known for her critiques of Kohlberg's theory. She basically said that Kohlberg focused only on boys in his study and did not look to separate by gender. She makes the argument that boys have a more absolute perspective of morality, while girls tend to look at the situation and relationships of the people involved before making a decision.