by Morton Hunt
Added to these strains and disappointments was a severe recurrence of his chronic parasitic infection, causing him racking stomach and intestinal pain. Kohlberg, nearing sixty, became deeply depressed. He had discussed the moral dilemma of suicide with a close friend, to whom he said that if one had important responsibilities to others, one ought to go on. But the battle became too much for him. On January 17, 1987, his car was found parked beside a tidal marsh of Boston Harbor, and three months later his body washed up at Logan Airport. In a loving memorial tribute in the Harvard Gazette of December 15, 1989, three eminent psychologists (Carol Gilligan was one of them) summed up his contribution: “[Larry] almost single-handedly established moral development as a central concern of developmental psychology.” He would have been gratified to hear that; what would have gratified him even more was that by the late 1990s, well over a hundred cross-cultural studies had confirmed that the development of moral reasoning in the stages set forth by Kohlberg does appear to be a cultural universal.101
Kohlberg revisionists do not disagree with his general theory so much as they modify it to accommodate their own empirical data.* Dennis Krebs is one who has done so. Although Krebs greatly admired Kohlberg, with whom he became acquainted at Harvard, he and colleague Kathy Denton published a study in 1990 demonstrating that whatever moral level people reason at when considering Kohlberg dilemmas, in situations in their own lives they are apt to reason at a lower level.102
The study is noteworthy because, unlike most other moral development research, it is based not only on a test but on a real-life situation. Kathy Denton went to bars, nightclubs, and parties and asked drinkers to take part in a study on “the effects of alcohol on judgment.” Volunteers—she collected forty in all—were interviewed then and there about two Kohlberg dilemmas, answered questions about the morality of driving when impaired (should you drive at all if impaired? if you are impaired but don’t feel drunk? if you take particular care?), and took a Breathalyzer test. In a follow-up session at the university, the same people were interviewed about two other Kohlberg dilemmas, and were asked how they got home the night of the first interview.
Denton and Krebs found that people scored higher in moral development at the university than they had when drinking; in fact, the higher their blood alcohol level at the first interview, the lower their moral judgment score. Worse, when they were sober they judged it morally wrong to drive when impaired and said that they themselves would not do so, but when they were drinking they took a less firm moral stand. Indeed, all but one drove home on the night they were first interviewed, no matter how impaired they were.
This is only one example of Krebs’s effort to measure moral development realistically. For some years he and colleagues conducted research projects using everyday dilemmas, rather than Kohlberg’s, to assess people’s moral judgment. (Two examples: a business dilemma—whether or not to disclose information that would jeopardize selling one’s business; a prosocial dilemma—a student with an appointment, coming up within a few minutes, to serve as a subject in a psychology experiment encounters another student having a bad drug trip who wants help.) In several of the studies, volunteers were also interviewed about moral dilemmas in their own lives.
More recently, Krebs has been conducting research on moral reasoning and behavior, his latest work being a neo-Darwinian explanation of the origin of morality, including altruism.103 Why would anyone spend so much time and effort in an area of psychology that is uncommonly contentious and, unlike mental testing, consumer psychology, and industrial psychology, offers no practical rewards? Developmentalists who concentrate on moral development have sundry motivations. Some were students in the idealistic 1960s and have been wedded to the study of prosocial behavior ever since; others are interested in morality from a religious viewpoint but find the psychological approach more realistic and productive; a handful of devoted moral development researchers are Holocaust survivors for whom the study of the humane side of humankind has been compensatory and healing.
And then there is Dennis Krebs, whose reasons are very special. Born in Vancouver in 1942, Krebs was the son of a carpenter and inventor of equipment to produce special effects on electric guitars. He was a top student and class president in junior high school and, though tall and skinny, a prize-winning amateur boxer. When he was fourteen, the family moved to the San Francisco area, where there were greater opportunities for his father in the electronic music business. The move was disastrous for young Dennis. In that milieu he rapidly changed from an upstanding youth to a juvenile delinquent. As he told the author of this book:
I went from a place where I was a Golden Boy to a culture I didn’t understand and where I didn’t fit in and people made fun of everything about me—my clothing, my accent, my behavior. Having been a very good boxer, I very quickly got into fights and developed a reputation for fights—which generated more fights, most of which I won, and as a result of which I became part of a gang.
He drifted into a pattern of skipping school, fighting, and shoplifting. Eventually he was caught and served first one, then a second, term of some months in a juvenile detention home. Released on parole, he stayed out of trouble for a while. But one night, after too little sleep and too much wine, he drove fast and erratically and was stopped by the police. They released him, but he said goodbye with a vulgar curse and roared away. He ignored the police chasing him with flashing lights and sirens, and ended up against a telephone pole. He was unhurt but was sentenced to the county jail. In a spirit of total defiance, he picked the lock on the bars at the window, slid down a rope made of sheets, and hitchhiked his way to Oregon. There he vanished into a remote logging camp, where he worked hard, thought a lot about his life, and made a plan:
I had gotten out of the context of delinquency and could see that I had to turn my life around. I decided to go back to Vancouver and go to the University of British Columbia. First I worked at a logging camp there for half a year, saving up enough money to start. Then I entered the university. By then I was in my twenties, a few years older than everyone else, and had this nagging sense of being behind, so I was an immensely intense and serious student, carrying extra courses and working part time.
I graduated in 1967, at 25, as the top student in psychology honors. I’d applied to Harvard, where I wanted to go on to a Ph.D., but when I was accepted, it hit me that I’d live in constant fear that somebody would expose me as an escaped convict. So I decided to give myself up. I went back to the San Francisco area and turned myself in—considering what I had become, it was very sensational and made the front pages and all the TV news shows—and the upshot was that I was pardoned.
Krebs went off to Harvard, where he earned his master’s in one year and his doctorate in two more—an almost unheard-of feat by that time and all the more remarkable since during part of his graduate years he had a half-time job as head teaching assistant of the introductory course in psychology and social relations at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in 1970, was immediately hired by Harvard as an assistant professor and head of the undergraduate program, and stayed for four years. Then he moved to Simon Fraser University and has been a full professor there since 1982. At sixty-five, he is still tall, reasonably trim, and relatively youthful-looking; one would never take him for so hardworking a scholar with so strange a history.
Krebs’s curriculum vitae has an impressive list of publications, most of them in the field of moral development. He has said of his career, “I think it’s no accident that I became so interested in moral development.” To which one must add that he has continued his own academic development by abandoning the Kohlberg approach after many years of working with it, devising a rather different model, and, as mentioned above, elaborating his own Darwinian explanation of the matter.
Development from A to Z
The latest trend in developmental psychology was foretold nearly four centuries ago by that most perceptive of lay psychologists, William Shakespeare. Unlike Piaget and
his followers, who see development as substantially complete by adolescence or early adulthood, Shakespeare offered a whole-life and less idealized picture in the famous “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy in As You Like It, in which Jaques sets out the “seven ages” of man, starting with “the infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” and ending with “second childishness, and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
As early as the 1920s, some psychologists began to think of development as continuing throughout life; it was then that several major longitudinal studies, described earlier, were begun. But their goal was primarily to measure changes over the years rather than to elucidate the processes that produced those changes. In 1950, however, the psychoanalyst and developmentalist Erik Erikson offered the first detailed process model of development throughout life, based on his analysis of the major psychosocial challenges confronting the individual at each of eight stages of life and the changes those challenges bring about.
Erikson (1902–1994), though he never earned a higher degree, was one of the most highly respected developmentalists in this country for over half a century and held professorships at several illustrious universities.104 He was born of Danish parents; his Protestant father left his Jewish mother before Erik was born, and she later married a German-Jewish pediatrician. Erik grew up doubly an outsider, scorned as a Jew in school but mocked as a goy in the synagogue because of his blond hair and blue eyes. The experience gave him a special interest in the struggle to achieve identity in the course of development.
In his youth he studied art and for a few years worked as an artist, but during a visit to Rome, poring over the works of Michelangelo and thinking of his own, he suffered such feelings of inferiority and anxiety that he went to Vienna to be psychoanalyzed by Anna Freud. The result was not only relief from the anxiety but a new goal: he studied psychoanalysis and became a lay analyst.
In 1933, when the Nazis achieved power in Germany, Erikson and his wife immigrated first to Denmark and then to America. He practiced psychoanalysis, taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago (eventually returning to Harvard), took part in longitudinal research at Berkeley, and spent some time with anthropologists investigating two Native American cultures. From his own diverse experiences he perceived human development as a lifelong process in which the individual undergoes a series of psychological struggles, each characteristic of a stage of life, and each resolved by the attainment of new knowledge and development of the personality.
The central issue in Stage 1, infancy, is the conflict between the basic attitudes of trust and mistrust. Through the relationship with loving parents the infant resolves the crisis, learning to appreciate interdependence and relatedness, and acquiring trust. In Stage 2, early childhood, the struggle is between the child’s need for a sense of autonomy versus a sense of doubt and shame. If allowed experiences of free choice and self-control under proper guidance, the child resolves the crisis by learning the importance of rules and acquiring self-control or will. So it goes, each stage presenting a new crisis, adding to the personality, building ever further, and, if passage through each stage is successful, achieving ever greater integration of the self with society.
Here is Erikson’s life-span view in tabular form. Each stage is a higher level of development than the preceding one:105
Stage: conflict Successful resolution
1. Infancy: basic trust vs. basic mistrust Trust
2. Early childhood: autonomy vs. shame Will power and independence
3. Play age: initiative vs. guilt Purpose
4. School age (six to ten or so): industry vs. inferiority Competency
5. Adolescence: identity vs. role confusion Sense of self
6. Early adulthood: intimacy vs. isolation Love
7. Middle adulthood: generativity vs. stagnation Caring for others; productiveness
8. Old age: ego integrity vs. despair Wisdom; a sense of integrity strong enough to withstand physical disintegration
Failure to pass through any stage successfully blocks normal healthful development. A neglected or unloved infant, for instance, may never learn to trust anyone, a lack that will interfere with or distort all the later stages of development. A young adolescent whose parents keep him or her too tightly bound to them may fail to pass successfully through Stage 5 and achieve an independent identity; the outcomes are such failures as “Momma’s boy,” at one extreme, and the rebellious delinquent at the other.
Erikson’s theory played a major part in the shift in developmental psychology to the life-span perspective. Another influence in that shift was the mass of life-span data produced by the several major longitudinal studies that had been under way for decades. A third was the passage of the post–World War II “baby boom” generation from childhood to young and middle adulthood, and the concomitant increase in the over-sixty-five segment of the population, both of which forced social scientists and legislators to pay attention to the changes and problems characteristic of middle and old age.
The shift to the life-span view began slowly in the 1950s, picked up in the 1960s, and became a definite trend in the 1970s. In that decade, the psychiatrist Roger L. Gould of the UCLA School of Medicine outlined a theory of adult life-stage development in several articles, the psychoanalyst George E. Vaillant of Dartmouth did likewise in Adaptation to Life, the psychologist Daniel J. Levinson of Yale did so in The Seasons of a Man’s Life; and the writer Gail Sheehy brought the message to a large popular audience with her best-selling Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. By 1980, although most research in developmental psychology still dealt with the early years of life, the view that development continues in stages throughout life had become the dominant paradigm of developmental psychology and the common opinion of the literate laity.106
Unlike Erikson’s view, current life-span developmentalism is pluralistic and deals with all aspects of development, not just the psychosocial. It explains the stage-by-stage changes in personality, social relations, and cognition in terms of biological influences, age-related psychological changes, and the social and environmental influences that are associated with particular ages as well as those which can occur at any age.107Moreover, unlike Erikson’s optimistic view, in which normal and healthy development is portrayed as ever onward and upward, the prevailing tone of most life-span developmentalism in recent years is empirical and grittily realistic. It sees development beyond the adult stage as a series of changes rather than continuing upward movement, as adaptation to changing realities rather than progress.
Not that today’s life-span developmentalism is pessimistic; indeed, some of its findings have been heartening. A few instances:
Adolescence: Many of the new data about the adolescent stage deal with familiar topics: sexual behavior, social development, the struggle to achieve emancipation from parental control, problems with self-esteem and anxiety. But contrary to long-standing opinion that adolescence is a period of intense turmoil, several research programs have found that for the majority of adolescents it is not. One study reported that, while 11 percent of young adolescents have serious chronic difficulties and 32 percent intermittent and probably situational difficulties, 57 percent experience “basically positive, healthy development during early adolescence.”108 And while drug and alcohol use, smoking, and sexual behavior increase during adolescence and create serious difficulties for some adolescents, one research team said that more often these behaviors are “purposive, self-regulating, and aimed at coping with problems of development.109 A summary of research held that few adolescents experience the turmoil and unpredictable behavior so often ascribed to them.110
Adult “crises”: The focus of adult development research has been on the strenuous transitions that men and women must make, particularly at about forty to forty-five, when they may see their careers topping out, dreams fading, children distancing themselves from the family, and physical youthfulness slipping away. It was S
heehy, the popularizer, who called them “predictable crises”; most researchers talked instead of painful and strenuous “transitional periods.”
One team found that only some men have a midlife crisis, and that most either thrive or muddle through. Others have found that the adult personality is not as rigid and unchanging, and wholly determined by childhood experiences, as had formerly been thought; many adults can adapt sufficiently to make successful transitions to new life circumstances. Paul Mussen and his co-authors said in Psychological Development: A Life-Span Approach, “Perhaps the most important result of the research on personality and aging is a renewed appreciation of the potential for personality change at any point in the life span.” Another research team has said that most people do cope with the inevitable challenges of the passing years, especially if they have a can-do attitude.111
Aging: Developmental change in the elderly has been a recognized field of research for two generations and a major one for at least two decades. Much of it has focused on the psychological changes brought about by declining physical abilities, chronic disease, the slowing down of mental functions, retirement, widowhood, the deaths of friends, and other losses. To such changes, it was widely believed, on the basis of aging studies conducted in Kansas City in the late 1950s, the common and beneficial adaptation was “disengagement”—minimizing stress by abandoning stressful roles and voluntarily withdrawing into a “subculture of aging.” But a reanalysis of the Kansas City data by the psychologist Robert J. Havighurst and his colleagues, and a twenty-five-year longitudinal study of aging at Duke University, showed that not to be the case. Some people choose to disengage and others are forced by ill health to do so, but most aging people maintain their social activities and adapt to the loss of friends and mates by expanding their contacts with younger people, particularly family members. Moreover, they are more content and psychologically healthier than those who disengage. This remains the dominant view of successful aging, which is now thought to involve the selection of the most appropriate goals for oneself, the directing of one’s efforts to areas of the highest priority, and the active seeking of ways to compensate for the losses that time brings.112
