Relationships between personality needs and moral development in college students.

Abstract

Kohlberg has devised a moral development theory consisting of six stages in irreversible sequence. An important construct of the theory is that moral development is more related to a cognitive developmental process than to personality. Rest developed the Defining Issues Test, a test of objectively measuring moral judgment using Kohlberg's theory. The subjects for this study were twenty-six males and thirty-four females in the junior or senior class at a small Midwestern university. The T-scores for college students for each need on the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule were correlated with the moral judgment P scores on the Defining Issues Test. A t test was used to determine the significance of the correlations. None of the relationships between personality needs and the level of moral judgment were significant.