so continuing in our unit on developmental psychology we are going to talk about moral development the most famous psychologist here is a man named Lawrence Colberg and what he actually does is he talks about this issue of morality so the first thing we need to do is Define what morality is morality is our sense of what is right and wrong and because there are so many different people in a pluralistic nation and a pluralistic world that have so many different ideas about what is right and wrong this area can get a little iffy and a little difficult there are a number of universal principles that the vast majority of people on earth live by and do accept as right and wrong so it may be a lot more black and white than we actually think this by the way can actually spin into a fascinating conversation and if you will actually look in the links section under Harvard Justice uh you will actually be able to bring up a video that does a good discussion on this whole topic which is not really the purpose of this particular um this particular video purpose of this video is just to give you a very concrete um idea of Colberg three stages of moral development so let's start with the first one Colberg basically used when he was reasoning in in terms of moral development he used a he used a test which is called the Hinds dilemma the Hines dilemma and so what I'm going to do real quick is I'm actually going to put the Hines dilemma up on the screen for a second and allow you to read it so you understand where Lawrence Colberg is getting his research from the hind dilemma a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer there was one drug that the doctors thought might save her it was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered the drug was expensive but the druggist was charging 10 times what it cost him to produce he paid $200 for the radium and charged 2,000 for a small dose of the drug the sick woman's husband Hines went to everyone he knew to borrow money but he could only get together about $1,000 which was half the cost he told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked if he would sell it to him at a cheaper price he also agreed to pay the full amount when he was able the druggist said no I discovered the drug and I expect to make money from it Hines became desperate and broke into the man's store and stole the drug for his wife should Hines have stolen the drug for his wife why or why not based on how people answered this question Colberg put them into three categories either preconventional conventional or postconventional when it came to their moral development okay as people gave their answers to this Colberg put them into three categories the first is what's called preconventional a preconventional person answers moral questions based on the idea of avoiding punishment so a preconventional answer to the Hines dilemma would be that Hines should not steal the drug because if he steals the drug he may end up going to prison the reasoning here is completely egocentric it is focused on Hines himself and it really negates the concern that Hines should have for his wife's life which would seem to somebody who is in a much higher stage of moral development to be a lot more important than the property rights of the person that is refusing to sell the drug the second stage is what is called a con the conventional stage and at this conventional stage a person is able to move past the idea of personal gain or loss and they look at the moral choice not through their own eyes and whether or not they're going to go to prison they look at it based on the values of society overall they look at it as if they're trying to make the moral decision based on what Society deems as acceptable okay because in the end if they do what Society deems is acceptable they are going to fit in with everybody else and they may even become a hero so a conventional answer to the he Hines dilemma might be that Hines should go ahead and steal the drug because he could save his wife and society would view him as a hero in the process of doing that the third moral stage of Colberg is What's called the postconventional stage in the co postconventional stage um basically this is the first time that morality um and societal rules are examined instead of just being blindly accepted so a person in the postconventional stage actually looks internally for what they believe so you'd have things like personal conviction coming in here to uphold Justice um somebody in the postconventional stage would actually answer the Hines dilemma by saying Hines should go ahead and steal the drug because his wife his wife's life outweighs the store owners's personal property that person has achieved a very high according to Colberg a very high level of moral development okay Colberg took a lot of criticism down here at the bottom Colberg took a lot of criticism for this his ideas of of morality these ideas of morality and his stages of morality are very helpful as a tool to examine how morality develops in people throughout life but when we look at Colberg a lot of people criticize this for two reasons they said number one that there was a real gender bias here because of the time period that he was doing this in he used primarily young males to answer the question and there has been research since then that might suggest that women would answer the question in a slightly different manner although a lot of that has actually been largely negated um in the fact that for the most part it it appears that gender is not a major issue in the development of moral the uh more rales I'm sorry the second issue in terms of criticisms of Colberg is that Western values because he was primarily using Europeans um and Americans that he was not addressing the concerns of Asian Society or the concerns of you know as far as Asian Society goes how the Indian population or how the Chinese or the Japanese population would answer that same question in the eastern part of the world the values of a group are very often put over the values of an individual so postconventional might look very different a person might go along with Society not because they're attempting to go along with Society but because they overall believe that that is actually the correct way to answer such a moral question