what are some of the contributions parents and/or peers make in the moral and cognitive development of adolescents?

Cultural Variations in Moral Reasoning 

Like studies showing cross-cultural variability in formal-operational reasoning, studies using Kohlbergian dilemmas (such as the Heinz dilemma) reveal significant differences between cultural groups in moral reasoning (Sachdeva, Singh, & Medin, 2011; Turiel, 2008b). Although there are some exceptions (Shweder, Mahapatpa, & Miller, 1987), most studies show that people who live in relatively small, technologically unsophisticated communities have primarily face-to-face interactions with others and have not received extensive schooling that exposes them to ways of life other than their own rarely reason beyond stage 3 on Kohlberg’s scale (Figure 14.9). Furthermore, social relationships in these communities may be strongly hierarchical in nature throughout life, providing little opportunity for the sort of equality of power that Kohlberg argued is essential to moral development (Eberhardt, 2014). 

Kohlberg suggested that cultural differences in social stimulation produce differences in moral reasoning. However, several developmentalists have argued that Kohlberg’s stage sequence, particularly in the higher stages, contains built-in value judgments that reflect the moral views of Western culture and democracy. Are we really to believe, such critics ask, that people who grow up in a traditional village in a developing country and reason at stage 2 of Kohlberg’s sequence are less moral than the residents of a city in a more developed country (Shweder, Minow, & Markus, 2002)? 

Kohlberg (1984) denied that cultural differences in performance on his dilemmas lead to the conclusion that some societies are more moral than others. He echoed the classical position of modern anthropology that cultures should be thought of as unique configurations of beliefs and institutions that help the social group adapt to both local conditions and universal aspects of life (Eberhardt, 2014). In this view, a culture in which stage 3 is the height of moral reasoning would be considered “morally equivalent” to a culture in which some people reason at stage 5 or 6, even though the specific reasoning practices could be scored as less “developed” according to Kohlberg’s criteria. 

Nevertheless, other approaches to moral reasoning have produced results that depart markedly from those obtained using Kohlberg’s methods. Cross-cultural studies have reported that by adulthood, a shift from conventional to postconventional moral reasoning is quite widespread if not universal (Gielen & Markoulis, 2001). For example, using their social domain theory, which emphasizes the need to separate moral issues from issues involving social convention and personal choice (see Chapter 13, pp. 451–452), Elliot Turiel and his colleagues also provide evidence that the pattern of development for moral reasoning, defined in terms of justice and rights, is universal across cultures. The areas in which cultural differences do appear tend to be those related to social conventions and personal choice, the importance of obedience to authority, and the nature of interpersonal relationships (Turiel, 2002; Wainryb, 1995). 

An extensive study by Cecilia Wainryb provides an excellent example of how moral reasoning is culturally universal while reasoning in other social domains is culturally specific. Wainryb compared judgments about social conflicts given by a large sample of Israeli 9- to 17-year-olds. Half the participants were Jews from a secular, Westernized part of the Israeli population. The other half were from Druze Arabic villages, where the cultural norms emphasize hierarchical family structures, fixed social roles, and severe punishment for violating traditional duties and customs. The study pitted questions about justice and personal choice against questions about authority and interpersonal considerations. 

Wainryb found no cultural or age differences in response to questions involving justice. For example, an overwhelming percentage of participants at all ages said that a boy who saw someone lose money should return it, even though the boy’s father said to keep the money—a conflict with authority. Jewish children were slightly more likely than Druze children to choose personal considerations over interpersonal considerations, but the variability within each cultural group was far larger than the variation between them. The only really significant cultural difference was that Jewish children were much more likely than Druze children to assert personal rights over authority—a result in line with the hierarchical family structure in Druze culture, in which obedience to authority is a central value. 

In a similar vein, Joan Miller and her colleagues found that while people from India and the United States may differ in where they draw the line between moral infractions and personal conventions, members of both groups distinguish between the two (Miller & Schaberg, 2003). For example, people from India and the United States judged the violation of dress codes in terms of social conventions, not moral issues; and members of both societies judged theft to be a moral issue, not a matter of social convention. These studies suggest that by dividing up questions of morality into separate domains, it is possible to obtain a subtler picture of cultural influences on moral reasoning in which there are both universal and culture-specific elements. 

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