Moral Development: The Four Stages Of Psychosocial Development

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theory of psychosocial development. Each stage involves a crisis in personality that will remain an issue in an individual’s life throughout his or her life. Moral development The ability to distinguish between right and wrong starts at an early stage in life and continues to develop throughout his life. A child continues to grow, the gain an understanding for fairness and the capacity to feel shameful, guilty and empathy and moral issues. As a person becomes capable of moral thought they are able to reason about moral issues and dilemmas in an advanced way and are able to behave according the general moral principles. To some extent different cultures foster different morals but all societies value the basic ones like fairness, justice and the concern for others. Moral development was studied by Lawrence Kohlberg who came up with six stages of moral development…show more content…
It consists of first stage and second stage of mo moral development which are concerned of self in an egotistical manner. In stage one individuals are focused on the direct consequences of their actions i.e. obedience and punishment. An action is considered wrong because if the individual does the action, he is punished. The second stage is interest driven in that an individual asks himself, ‘how do I benefit. An individual’s behaviour is influenced by how he stands to benefit. Hence the interest of others is based on what they do for the individual. In these stages there is the lack of a societal perspective in all the actions that are done by an individual. The convectional level of moral reasoning which starts to occur during the adolescent phase and goes on to the adult stage involves judging of an individual’s action according to what the expectations of the society. Hence individual actions are in adherence to what the society considers a social
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