Developing conceptions of authority and contract across the lifespan: Two perspectives ☆

Abstract Kohlberg’s moral stage scale is but one of a number of “Piagetian” developmental scales proposed during the latter part of this century. Kohlberg claimed that his moral stages fulfilled the criteria for “hard” Piagetian stages—invariant sequence, qualitative change, and structured wholeness. He also argued that his scoring system measures a dimension of thought with a unique structure. To explore these contentions, we compare the concepts that define Kohlbergian stages with those associated with orders of hierarchical complexity as determined with the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System, a generalized content-independent stage-scoring system. We conclude that the sequence of conceptual development specified by Kohlberg generally matches the sequence identified with the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System, and that contract and authority concepts identified with a methodology that employs the Hierarchical Complexity Scoring System match the concepts that define theoretically analogous Kohlbergian stages above Kohlberg’s stage 2. However, we argue that Kohlberg’s stages 1 and 2 do not accurately describe the development of moral concepts in young children.