In his 1968 study of moral development, Kohlberg used semi-structured interviews containing hypothetical moral dilemmas. Which of the following best explains why Kohlberg focused on the participants' qualitative justifications (the 'why') rather than their final moral choices (the 'yes/no' decision)?
Closed-ended moral choices are highly prone to social desirability bias, whereas open-ended qualitative justifications are entirely immune to participant reactivity.
Individuals at entirely different stages of moral development can arrive at the same moral choice but do so using completely different cognitive justifications.
The final moral choice is highly unstable over time, whereas the cognitive structures underlying moral reasoning remain completely unchanged from childhood through adulthood.
The moral choices were used exclusively to gather quantitative baseline data, whereas the justifications were analyzed to assess the participants' emotional temperament.
22 exam-style questions on OCR A Level Psychology Moral development, covering Kohlberg (1968): Stages of moral development and Lee et al. (1997): Evaluations of lying and truth-telling. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.