6 ways to be good: What’s behind moral behavior?

Author: Matthew Davis / Source: Big Think

Lawrence Kohlberg, a famous psychologist, developed this framework to categorize how people think about morality.
These six stages progress from the simplistic to the complex. Generally, as people age, they progress through the stages, although some unpleasant individuals get stuck.
Although quantifying morality is challenging and the framework isn’t perfect, spending more time to think about what “good” means to you is valuable.

We’ve all met people who always seem to act based on their own self-interest, who behave well out of fear of punishment, or who think morality and what’s legal are synonymous. On the other hand, some people seem like their moral compass always points true north, even when its inconvenient — or just annoying in conversation.

It’s not a simple task to determine what makes (im)moral people tick. Morality is almost entirely subjective and context-dependent. Despite its inherently slippery nature, psychologists have been trying to pin down what goes into moral behavior for decades. One of the first to do so was a psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg.

Kohlberg developed a framework consisting of six stages of morality. Broadly, the stages are classified as pre-conventional, conventional, or post-conventional morality. As people age, they pass through — or fail to pass through — each stage, successively developing a more and more nuanced moral system.

Pre-conventional morality

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People with a pre-conventional sense of morality are likely to litter at music festivals.

They won’t be punished for littering, and they won’t be rewarded for throwing their trash away either.

Stage 1: Avoiding punishment

People in the first stage of morality act based on how much trouble they’re going to get in. Stealing a car will get you arrested and put in jail, so you won’t steal a car. This kind of thinking has nothing to do with what society thinks about stealing or with what’s “right” in a philosophical sense. Punishment hurts, so don’t get punished.

People in this stage don’t understand how their actions affect others, or why they ought to care about others. They respect authority to the degree that authority can punish them. As a consequence, people in this stage might see others who have been punished and assume that they must have “deserved” it.

Essentially, this is the morality of young children. While most people grow to the later stages as they age, some (terrible and unpleasant) people get stuck at this stage or in the ensuing stages.

Stage 2: What’s in it for me?

The big insight in stage two is that people have different perspectives and needs, but this understanding isn’t very broad. To a stage-two thinker, other people’s interests exist only in the sense that they can be leveraged to further his or her own interests. The mindset here is best described as transactional. What makes behavior “good” is that it is rewarded. In this sense, it’s the flipside of the coin of stage one, where bad behavior is that which is punished.

Like stage one, people who fall into this category are generally young children, but you can also find adults who are stuck at this stage, typically working in politics.