The Measurement of Structure: A New Approach to Assessing Affective and Cognitive Aspects of Moral Judgment Behavior, and Findings from Research

According to modern psychology, morality is a matter not only of attitudes towards moral principles but also of people's competence to utilize those principles. In a series of longitudinal and cross-cultural studies, comprising several thousand subjects, both aspects have been assessed simultaneously by using the Moral Judgment Test, based on the methodology of Experimental Questionnaire (EQ). Similar to Kohlberg's methodology, this test contains a discourse about moral dilemmas. However, with the MJT, the discourse between the subjects and the interviewer is designed as a multivariate task. The design of the MJT includes three factors: (a) Types of dilemma, (b) stages of reasons discussed, © opinion agreement or disagreement about the solution. Its main function is to assess individuals' competence of making consistently moral judgments in a dispute situation (rather than merely defending one's own opinion). In this presentation, major findings of the studies mentioned will be reviewed, and their implications for both the validity of cognitive theory of moral development and for educational research in the moral domain will be discussed.