Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide

Every designer who has ever written a “Code of Conduct” page has collided with the same silent problem: different users are playing by different moral rule-books and all of them feel correct from the inside. The eight-year-old on your platform is not reasoning about fairness the way your compliance officer is. The teenager in your community is not weighing trust the way your senior engineer is. And your VP of Growth, under a quarterly bonus, is almost certainly reasoning from a different level than the ethics statement your founder framed on the wall. When all of those moral stages meet inside one system, any design choice that pretends the user is “rational” in the economist’s sense is going to fail — and usually does, in the direction of the lowest stage in the room.

Lawrence Kohlberg spent thirty years documenting this problem. Starting in 1958 with his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, he interviewed boys and young men about a fictional pharmacist named Heinz who had to decide whether to steal an overpriced cancer drug to save his dying wife. Kohlberg was not interested in whether the subjects said yes or no. He was interested in the reasoning they gave for their answer. What came out of those transcripts was a theory that ranks every human moral argument ever made into six ascending stages across three levels — pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional — and a claim that people actually move up through those stages in an invariant sequence, the way a child moves through Piaget’s cognitive stages. Most adults, Kohlberg argued, never leave stage three or four.

This post is the S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide to what Kohlberg actually argued, what five decades of empirical work have either confirmed or dismantled (the Gilligan critique and the cross-cultural critiques are serious, and you need to know them in order to use the theory honestly), how the neuroscience of moral judgment has reshaped the field since Joshua Greene’s fMRI work, and exactly which of the 8 Core Drives of the Octalysis Framework light up at each Kohlberg stage. If you design systems people have to live inside — products, games, schools, teams, communities, or policy frameworks — the question of which stage your design is implicitly asking users to reason from is the question, and Kohlberg gave us the most detailed vocabulary for answering it.

⚡ Speed Run Notes

• Kohlberg’s theory says moral reasoning develops in six stages across three levels (pre-conventional, conventional, post-conventional), moving from punishment-avoidance to universal ethical principle — not overnight, but over decades, and most adults stop at stages three or four.
• The cleanest empirical finding: the sequence is invariant (almost nobody skips stages or goes backwards) but the endpoint is not guaranteed — post-conventional reasoning is the exception, not the rule, even in college-educated Western samples.
• Carol Gilligan’s 1982 critique is load-bearing and cannot be hand-waved: Kohlberg’s original sample was 72 boys, stage three sounds suspiciously like “feminine care,” and there is a real alternative axis of moral reasoning (the ethic of care) that his justice-oriented scoring rubric systematically under-weights.
• The Judgment-Action gap (Blasi 1980; Walker 2002) is the finding that should keep every designer awake: measured moral reasoning correlates with actual moral behavior at only r = 0.30-0.40. Getting users to stage five in a survey does not mean they will do the stage-five thing when the interface asks.
• Octalysis maps the stages cleanly: pre-conventional is pure Black-Hat territory — Core Drive 6 (CD6): Scarcity & Impatience and Core Drive 8 (CD8): Loss & Avoidance; conventional is Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness plus Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling as role-obligation; post-conventional is CD1 as authentic Epic Meaning. Design choices that skip stages are the single most reliable way to make users feel manipulated.
• Practical upshot: your system is being used by players across at least three different stages at once. The design question is not “what is the right moral frame?” but “what is the lowest moral frame my design still works at?” — because that is the stage the marginal user is actually occupying.

Table of Contents

About Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou is an S-Tier Behavioral Designer and the creator of the Octalysis Framework, the gamification design system now applied to products and experiences reaching over 1.5 billion users. His book Actionable Gamification is one of the most-cited works in the field, and he has been ranked the #1 Gamification Guru in the World.

He has advised MrBeast, LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Tesla, Stanford, Harvard, and governments including Ukraine on turning behavioral psychology into product mechanics that actually change user behavior.

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What Is Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development?

Kohlberg’s theory of moral development is a stage theory of moral reasoning — not moral feeling, not moral behavior, and not moral knowledge. It claims that the cognitive structure a person uses to justify a moral judgment develops through an invariant sequence of six distinct stages, organized into three broader levels, over the course of roughly the first three decades of life, with most people stabilizing at a particular stage and never progressing further without a triggering life experience or deliberate intervention.

The crucial move Kohlberg made, starting with his 1958 doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago under the supervision of Anne Roe, was to stop asking whether a moral answer was right or wrong and start asking how the person got to that answer. He presented subjects with a series of moral dilemmas — the most famous being the Heinz dilemma, in which a man must decide whether to steal an extortionately-priced cancer drug to save his dying wife — and then probed the reasoning behind their answers through semi-structured interviews that sometimes ran for two or three hours per subject. Over the next twenty years, Kohlberg and his collaborators at Harvard transcribed, coded, and re-coded thousands of those interviews. What emerged from that laborious process is still, arguably, the single most influential stage theory in moral psychology, even though the original 1958 version was substantially revised multiple times before his death in 1987.

Two claims are doing most of the theoretical work. The first is that the stages are structurally distinct: a stage-three reasoner is not just “more sophisticated” than a stage-two reasoner in the same way that a stage-two reasoner is sophisticated — the stage-three reasoner is operating on a qualitatively different cognitive structure, one that recognizes and can reason about categories (like social roles, mutual expectations, shared norms) that the stage-two reasoner literally cannot see. The second claim is that moral development follows an invariant sequence: you move up stage by stage, you do not skip, and you do not meaningfully regress — an empirical claim that has been stress-tested in dozens of longitudinal studies since, and mostly holds.

Kohlberg located his own work explicitly in the lineage of Jean Piaget, who had proposed an earlier, simpler two-stage theory of moral reasoning in 1932 (heteronomous morality of constraint in young children, autonomous morality of cooperation in older children). Where Piaget stopped at roughly age twelve, Kohlberg extended the stages into adolescence and adulthood, and added the crucial post-conventional level that has become both the most celebrated and the most contested part of the theory.

The Core Findings: Six Stages, Three Levels, One Heinz Dilemma

The cleanest way to understand Kohlberg is to walk the six stages, because the content of each stage is what makes the theory do work in the real world. Each stage pair maps onto one of the three levels.

Level 1: Pre-Conventional Morality (typically before age 9)

At the pre-conventional level, the person has not yet internalized the moral norms of the society around them. Moral reasoning is self-interested and consequence-driven; the relevant question is always what happens to me if I do this.

Stage 1 — Obedience and Punishment Orientation. Something is wrong because you get punished for it. Authorities (parents, teachers, God, the bigger kid) define right and wrong by distributing consequences, and the child’s job is to avoid the consequences. A stage-one reasoner told the Heinz dilemma might say “Heinz should not steal because he will go to jail.” The reasoning has no room for the wife’s life; the jail is the morally relevant object.

Stage 2 — Instrumental Exchange / Self-Interest Orientation. Something is right because it gets me what I want. Fairness enters the reasoning, but only as an instrumental calculation — “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.” A stage-two reasoner on Heinz might say “He should steal because his wife being alive is worth more to him than the jail time is a cost” or “He shouldn’t, because he can get another wife but not another life without a record.” The reasoning is transactional; the moral is the cost-benefit.

Level 2: Conventional Morality (most older children and the majority of adults)

At the conventional level, moral reasoning has internalized the norms of the immediate social group (stage three) and then the broader society (stage four). “Right” is no longer what pays off personally; it is what maintains relationships and social order.

Stage 3 — Interpersonal Accord / “Good Boy, Good Girl” Orientation. Something is right because it is what a good person, a good friend, a good spouse would do. The reasoning is oriented toward being perceived as good by those whose opinions matter, and toward living up to role expectations. A stage-three reasoner on Heinz often says “Heinz should steal because a good husband would do anything to save his wife” or “He shouldn’t, because a good citizen doesn’t steal.” Relationship and role are the load-bearing structures.

Stage 4 — Law and Order / Social-System Orientation. Something is right because it follows the law and maintains the social order. The reasoning extends stage three’s interpersonal focus to the level of society as a whole: laws exist for good reason and must be upheld even when they produce hard local outcomes, because the alternative is social chaos. A stage-four reasoner on Heinz typically says “Heinz should not steal — the law exists for everyone, and if we let people break it when they have a good reason, the system falls apart.” This is where most Western adults stabilize. It is also the stage at which large institutions — corporations, governments, militaries — are typically designed to operate.

Level 3: Post-Conventional Morality (a minority of adults, usually after college and often only under triggering life experience)

At the post-conventional level, the person recognizes that the conventional rules of society are themselves products of social agreement and can be evaluated against deeper principles. “Right” becomes a matter of principle, not of role or law.

Stage 5 — Social Contract / Legalistic Orientation. Something is right because it maximizes welfare or protects rights, within a framework the reasoner recognizes as a social contract that could in principle be renegotiated. Laws are respected but seen as imperfect instruments that sometimes conflict with more basic commitments (life, liberty, fairness). A stage-five reasoner on Heinz says “The law against theft is usually right, but it was not written to cover the case of a pharmacist pricing a cancer drug beyond reach. In this edge case, preserving life overrides the property right, and Heinz’s reasoned disobedience is a legitimate act of civil conscience.”

Stage 6 — Universal Ethical Principles. Something is right because it accords with self-chosen ethical principles that are internally consistent, comprehensive, and universal — principles the person would apply regardless of role, nation, or era. A stage-six reasoner recognizes human life as a universal, non-negotiable good that outweighs contingent arrangements like drug-pricing law. The most famous real-world exemplars Kohlberg himself invoked were Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the ethical framework of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative.

One honest caveat: stage six is almost never observed empirically in spontaneous interviews. Kohlberg himself later softened his position to the point of scoring it largely as a theoretical end-point rather than a measurable stage, and his final Standard Issue Scoring Manual (1987) mostly treats the highest honest stage as 5 for most practical purposes.

The Heinz Dilemma, Verbatim

Because the stages are defined by the reasoning rather than the answer, a single dilemma can elicit responses from any of the six. Here is the Heinz dilemma as Kohlberg presented it, translated into modern language:

A woman is dying of a rare cancer. There is one drug that the doctors think might save her, recently discovered by a local pharmacist. The pharmacist is charging ten thousand dollars for a small dose — ten times what it cost to make. Heinz, the woman’s husband, goes to everyone he knows to borrow the money but can only raise half. He asks the pharmacist to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. The pharmacist refuses: “I discovered the drug and I’m going to make money from it.” Heinz gets desperate and breaks into the store to steal the drug for his wife. Should Heinz have done that? Why?

The same dilemma has been given to subjects ranging from eight-year-olds to monastics in their seventies, in roughly a dozen cultures. Stage-one subjects focus on the punishment; stage-two on the trade-off; stage-three on whether a good husband would steal; stage-four on the rule of law; stage-five on when rights override laws; stage-six on the underlying universal principle of life itself. Note that all six stages can produce either a “yes, he should steal” or a “no, he should not” answer — the stage shows up in the reasoning, not the verdict.

What Kohlberg Got Right

Five decades of cross-cultural and longitudinal work have confirmed a surprising amount of the core architecture. Before we move into the critiques — which are serious and load-bearing — it is worth being honest about what the data has actually upheld, because honest designers need to know the theory’s genuine empirical floor before they know its ceiling.

The stages really are structurally distinct. Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs, and Lieberman’s famous 1983 longitudinal study tracked fifty-eight men across twenty years and found that their moral reasoning, when scored using the Standard Issue Scoring Manual, shifted gradually and structurally rather than flipping between stages at random. The structural coherence across dilemmas for a given subject at a given age was high; a person who reasoned at stage three on the Heinz dilemma also reasoned at stage three or four on a series of other dilemmas. This is the clearest piece of evidence for the stage-theory architecture surviving critique.

The sequence is largely invariant. In the same longitudinal sample, subjects moved up the stages monotonically: stage two to stage three to stage four, rarely skipping a stage and almost never regressing for longer than a single interview. Snarey’s 1985 meta-analytic review of forty-five cross-cultural studies confirmed the invariant sequence for stages one through four across nearly every culture tested — a surprisingly strong universal finding, given how sharp the cross-cultural critiques of the higher stages are.

Moral-reasoning stage predicts life outcomes that matter. The Defining Issues Test (DIT), developed by James Rest, Steven Thoma, Muriel Bebeau, and Darcia Narvaez as a multiple-choice paper-and-pencil successor to Kohlberg’s interview method, has been correlated with outcomes including medical-school clinical performance (Sheehan et al. 1980), accountant whistleblowing (Bernardi 1994), and military-officer ethical behavior (Bartek et al. 1993). Effect sizes are modest (r typically between 0.15 and 0.35), but they are consistent across decades and sample types — DIT stage scores are a real psychological construct predicting real behavior, not a statistical mirage.

The pedagogical implication is correct. “Just Community” schools, modeled explicitly on Kohlberg’s theory and launched at Cambridge Cluster School and later at Scarsdale Alternative High School, consistently produced measurable upward stage shifts in their students relative to matched controls (Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg 1989). If you deliberately expose students to moral dilemmas one stage above their current reasoning, and give them space to argue the case in community, they move up. That is a strong, replicated finding with direct application to every piece of “community guidelines” copy ever written.

Kohlberg forced moral psychology to take reasoning seriously as a measurable construct. Before the Moral Judgment Interview and the Defining Issues Test, moral psychology was mostly philosophy and anecdote. Kohlberg’s insistence on coding reasoning transcripts using a published manual with trained raters dragged the field into actual measurement, and almost every modern moral-psychology instrument — the DIT, the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale — descends from that methodological decision, even when the authors of those instruments disagree with Kohlberg’s specific stage structure.

Where Kohlberg Falls Apart

This is the section that matters most if you intend to use Kohlberg in design rather than just quote him. Three critiques are serious and survive every honest reading of the data; any treatment of Kohlberg that skips them is boilerplate.

Critique 1: Gilligan’s “Ethic of Care” — the Sample and the Scoring Rubric

The most famous critique, and the one every designer needs to internalize, is Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book In a Different Voice. Gilligan, a former collaborator of Kohlberg’s at Harvard, pointed out that Kohlberg’s 1958 longitudinal sample consisted of seventy-two boys, and that when women were later scored on the Moral Judgment Interview they frequently appeared to score lower than men, clustering around stage three while men clustered at stage four. Gilligan argued that this was not evidence of female moral deficiency but evidence that Kohlberg’s scoring rubric was systematically under-weighting an alternative axis of moral reasoning she called the ethic of care, as distinct from Kohlberg’s ethic of justice.

In the ethic of care, moral reasoning foregrounds relationship, context, responsibility, and the particular needs of particular people. A response to the Heinz dilemma that focused on whether the pharmacist, Heinz, and the dying wife might find a solution through continued conversation, or whether Heinz’s duty to his wife as a relationship is more fundamental than the abstract property question, would be scored relatively low on Kohlberg’s justice scoring but might represent a genuinely sophisticated care-based reasoning. Gilligan’s critique was that the theory treated one well-developed axis of moral reasoning as if it were the only axis.

The empirical follow-up is nuanced. Jaffee and Hyde’s 2000 meta-analysis of 113 studies found a small but real gender effect in the predicted direction (women more likely to use care orientation, men more likely to use justice orientation), but also found that both men and women use both orientations, that context matters more than gender, and that Kohlberg’s revised Standard Issue Scoring Manual (1987) eliminated most of the measurable sex difference in stage scores. Gilligan’s critique forced the revision and forced the field to treat care as an independent axis; it did not, in the end, show that women reason at a consistently lower stage, because the apparent lower stage was a measurement artifact.

For designers, the load-bearing lesson is narrower and more useful: your system is very likely scoring one axis of moral reasoning and ignoring the other, and the axis you are ignoring is the one that shows up most strongly in the people who most need your product to work well. If your community guidelines emphasize rules, precedents, and consistent enforcement (justice), and your moderation system penalizes contextual arguments about relationship and responsibility (care), you will systematically alienate the half of your users who reason primarily in the care mode — and the gender skew of that alienation will be predictable.

Critique 2: The Cultural and WEIRD Problem

Kohlberg was explicit that his theory claimed universality: the six stages, in that order, were supposed to represent universal moral-cognitive development for any human being capable of the underlying cognitive operations. Thirty years of cross-cultural data have been unkind to the strongest version of that claim.

Richard Shweder, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Joan Miller’s 1987 and 1990 studies of moral reasoning in Bhubaneswar, India, found moral discourses that could not be cleanly mapped onto Kohlberg’s six stages. In particular, an ethic of community (duties to in-group, fulfillment of role, respect for elders) and an ethic of divinity (moral purity, respect for the sacred, avoidance of pollution) appeared to be fully elaborated adult moral systems in their sample — not pre-conventional failures to reach stage four, but distinct adult moral orientations that Kohlberg’s coding could not recognize. Shweder’s subsequent “Big Three” framework (autonomy, community, divinity) became one of the most influential alternative taxonomies in cross-cultural moral psychology.

Joseph Henrich’s 2010 paper “The Weirdest People in the World,” with Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan, named the problem bluntly: psychology’s samples are disproportionately drawn from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) populations, and those populations show reasoning patterns that are outliers relative to the human species as a whole. Kohlberg’s post-conventional stages, particularly the rights-based social-contract reasoning of stage five, show up disproportionately in exactly these WEIRD samples. Snarey’s 1985 review found stage-five reasoning in zero percent of samples from traditional tribal, folk, or village societies. That is not evidence those societies are morally underdeveloped; it is evidence that the scoring rubric was built to identify the post-Enlightenment liberal-individualist moral vocabulary and under-recognizes the communitarian and sacred moral vocabularies that dominate most human history.

Jonathan Haidt’s 2001 “Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail” paper and the subsequent Moral Foundations Theory (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek 2009) extended Shweder’s critique by proposing five (later six) moral foundations — Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, Liberty/Oppression — that together span the moral vocabularies of cultures Kohlberg’s stages cannot handle. The political-psychology literature has since shown that American liberals reason primarily using Care and Fairness (the two foundations Kohlberg’s justice-oriented rubric most readily scores), while American conservatives use all five or six foundations roughly equally. Which again raises the designer’s question: whose moral vocabulary is your system implicitly treating as “higher”?

Critique 3: The Judgment-Action Gap — Moral Reasoning Is Not Moral Behavior

Augusto Blasi’s 1980 landmark review in Psychological Bulletin collected every available study correlating Kohlberg-style moral-reasoning measures with actual moral behavior. The modal correlation was in the range r = 0.30 to 0.40, which means that stage scores account for roughly nine to sixteen percent of the variance in what people actually do. Lawrence Walker’s 2002 review two decades later reached a similar conclusion: moral reasoning is a real and measurable construct, but the bridge from reasoning to action has many moderators, and getting a high Kohlberg score does not reliably translate into doing the high-Kohlberg thing when the moment arrives.

Stanley Milgram’s 1963 obedience studies — which you can read about in the companion Milgram’s Obedience to Authority pillar — are the most damning single piece of evidence: subjects who could articulate sophisticated stage-four-and-above reasoning about why shocking a stranger was wrong nonetheless continued to shock the stranger when a lab-coated authority told them to. The Darley and Latané bystander studies showed the same pattern from a different angle: people who would describe the moral obligation to help a stranger in crisis at stage four or five level failed to act when the situation surrounded them with other non-responding witnesses.

Jonathan Haidt’s social-intuitionist model (2001) went further than Blasi and argued that the direction of causation between reasoning and judgment is often reversed: the moral judgment comes first, rapidly and intuitively, and the reasoning is post-hoc rationalization for the intuition. Joshua Greene’s fMRI work (2001; 2004; 2008) supported a dual-process account where fast emotional responses drive most “deontological” moral judgments and slower deliberative reasoning drives most “utilitarian” judgments — meaning that a stage-five-sounding argument for overriding a law to save a life might actually be a rationalization of a gut-level emotional reaction to suffering, not the principled deliberation Kohlberg’s scoring implicitly assumed.

For designers, the judgment-action gap is the single most dangerous point to forget. A user who, in a survey, endorses your platform’s beautifully-drafted stage-five ethics statement is not meaningfully more likely to do the stage-five thing when the interface is designed to trigger stage-two self-interest. Culture eats reasoning for breakfast; architecture eats culture for lunch. If your architecture is optimized for short-term conversion, no amount of community-standards prose will get your users reasoning at stage four when the system is paying them (in likes, streaks, or badges) to reason at stage two.

The Brain on Moral Reasoning

Kohlberg was a developmental psychologist working before neuroimaging; he wrote as if moral reasoning was a coherent cognitive faculty that ripened over time in a uniform direction. The neuroscience that arrived after his death has complicated that picture without displacing it entirely, and the modern synthesis is worth knowing because it dictates which Octalysis Core Drives are actually in play at each stage.

Joshua Greene’s fMRI studies (2001-2008). Greene and colleagues scanned subjects while they considered moral dilemmas including variants of the trolley problem. “Personal” moral dilemmas (pushing a stranger off a bridge to save five people) selectively engaged the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and other emotion-related regions and produced slower reaction times when subjects reached utilitarian conclusions; “impersonal” dilemmas (throwing a switch to divert the trolley) engaged dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal regions associated with working memory and abstract reasoning. The upshot: Kohlberg’s higher stages are not a single cognitive achievement but a shifting balance between at least two distinct neural systems, one emotional and fast, one deliberative and slow.

Michael Koenigs et al. (2007, Nature). Patients with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) lesions showed a pronounced shift toward utilitarian responses on personal moral dilemmas — more willing to push the stranger off the bridge. VMPFC damage knocks out the fast emotional response that normally objects to personally-caused harm, leaving the deliberative utilitarian calculation to run uncontested. This is strong evidence that what Kohlberg would score as stage-five reasoning can, in at least some cases, be produced by a specific neurological deficit rather than by moral development.

Jorge Moll and Jordan Grafman’s work (2005; 2007). Using fMRI to map the neural correlates of moral emotions — guilt, compassion, disgust, moral elevation — Moll’s lab identified a distributed moral network including the anterior temporal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and subcortical reward regions. Critically, the same reward regions that light up for food, sex, and money also light up for charitable giving, providing neural evidence for the intrinsic-reward nature of pro-social behavior — the Octalysis Right-Brain intrinsic Core Drives (CD3, CD4, CD5) have a literal reward-circuit signature.

Default-mode network and moral cognition. Subsequent work by Marco Iacoboni, Antonio Damasio, and others has placed much of sustained moral reflection inside the default-mode network — the brain-wide network most active during mind-wandering, self-reflection, and social reasoning. This explains why moral reasoning feels effortful yet personal, and why practices like solitude, journaling, and perspective-taking exercises appear to accelerate Kohlberg-style stage progression. The Just Community schools’ effectiveness probably runs through deliberate activation of this network.

What the neuroscience does NOT show. It does not show that Kohlberg’s stages are illusory. It shows that any given stage is a characteristic pattern of interaction between emotional and deliberative systems, not a pure cognitive achievement, and that progression up the stages is best understood as an increase in the integration of these systems rather than a replacement of one by the other. Designers who over-read Greene and conclude that moral reasoning is “just rationalization” have over-corrected; the reasoning has real causal force in repeated and reflective decisions, even if it is often outrun by intuition in single-shot ones.

Kohlberg vs Other Moral-Psychology Theories

Kohlberg sits at the center of a web of related and competing theories. Knowing the neighbors is how you use Kohlberg intelligently rather than reflexively.

Piaget’s two-stage theory (1932). Piaget proposed two stages: heteronomous morality (young children, rules are fixed and handed down by authority, consequences matter more than intent) and autonomous morality (older children, rules are recognized as mutual agreements between peers, intent matters more than consequence). Kohlberg’s stages one and two correspond roughly to Piaget’s heteronomous morality; stages three through six extended the theory into adolescence and adulthood, which Piaget had largely not addressed. The cleanest way to see Kohlberg: he took Piaget’s developmental framework, grafted it onto post-childhood moral reasoning, and added the post-conventional ceiling that Piaget did not attempt.

Carol Gilligan’s Ethic of Care (1982). Already discussed above. Gilligan proposed three positions in moral development organized around care: pre-conventional care (exclusive focus on self), conventional care (self-sacrifice for others), and post-conventional care (balanced responsibility to self and others). The modern consensus treats care and justice as complementary axes rather than competing sequences, and Rest’s DIT scoring explicitly incorporates both.

James Rest’s Four Component Model (1984). Rest — Kohlberg’s most methodologically important successor — argued that moral behavior is not a single construct but four: moral sensitivity (noticing a moral issue exists), moral judgment (reasoning about the right answer, which is the Kohlberg part), moral motivation (prioritizing moral concerns over competing ones), and moral character (actually following through under stress). Rest’s model is the cleanest explanation of the judgment-action gap: the reasoning component is only one of four, and a failure at any of the other three — not noticing, not caring enough, not having the character to act — can produce the same non-moral behavior regardless of stage.

Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory (2001; 2004; 2009). Haidt rejects the stage framework entirely and instead proposes that moral cognition is organized around a set of innate moral foundations — Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and later Liberty/Oppression — that are developed or suppressed differently in different cultures. Moral reasoning is mostly post-hoc rationalization of fast intuitive responses from these foundations. Haidt’s theory handles the cultural data much better than Kohlberg’s, but is correspondingly weaker at predicting individual development over time.

Turiel’s Social Domain Theory (1983). Elliot Turiel argued that children as young as three distinguish between moral (harm, fairness), conventional (customs, dress codes), and personal (choices about one’s own body and life) domains, and do not progress through Kohlberg’s stages in a single sequence because different domains are reasoned about with different logics from very early. Turiel’s model has had considerable influence in educational psychology and overlaps substantially with Haidt’s foundations view.

Georg Lind’s Dual Aspect Theory (2008) and the Moral Competence Test. Lind distinguished moral orientation (what values you hold) from moral competence (your ability to apply those values consistently under challenge) and argued that Kohlberg’s stage scoring conflates the two. His Moral Competence Test measures only competence and has become an increasingly-used successor instrument in European educational research.

The takeaway for designers: treat Kohlberg as the developmental spine, Rest as the behavioral-component check, Haidt as the cross-cultural sanity check, and Gilligan as the axis-of-reasoning check. No one of them is sufficient alone; together they triangulate a usable operating picture of moral cognition.

Kohlberg’s Stages in the Real World

The value of a stage theory is the predictions it licenses in applied settings. Here are the four domains where Kohlberg’s framework has had the most durable impact, and where a behavioral designer is most likely to encounter it.

Education and Character Development

The Just Community schools — launched at the Cambridge Cluster School in 1974 under Kohlberg’s direct supervision — tried to operationalize stage theory as pedagogy. The schools held weekly community meetings in which students and teachers debated real disciplinary cases (a theft, a drug incident, a bullying episode) using a one-person-one-vote structure. The theoretical wager was that exposing students to moral arguments one stage above their current reasoning, in the context of a real-stakes community, would trigger stage progression. Follow-up studies (Power, Higgins, and Kohlberg 1989) found the wager mostly paid off: Just Community students showed measurable Kohlberg-stage progression relative to matched controls. The Just Community model has since influenced character education programs in dozens of countries and is the closest thing moral psychology has to a replicable intervention.

The applied version in your own design: community guidelines written at stage four (rules for everyone) are maximally durable, because most adults reason at stage four and the minority at higher stages will accept stage-four framing as a reasonable lower bound. Guidelines written purely at stage two (you will be banned) activate defensive reasoning; guidelines written purely at stage five (we trust your moral discernment) often collapse because most of your users do not actually reason at stage five.

Business Ethics and Corporate Compliance

James Rest’s Defining Issues Test is one of the most-administered instruments in American business-ethics research. Bernardi’s work on accounting-profession whistleblowing found DIT-measured moral reasoning predicted willingness to blow the whistle after controlling for perceived cost and organizational loyalty, at effect sizes around r = 0.25. Corporate ethics training programs that explicitly use dilemma-discussion methods (modeled on Just Community) have shown small but durable DIT-score increases in longitudinal studies, while compliance training that consists purely of rule recitation has not.

The design lesson: corporate ethics codes and product-level trust-and-safety policies fail in exactly the way Kohlberg would predict. They are typically written at stage five (principled) but enforced at stage one (punitive), and the contradiction is visible to the employees and users — which destroys the trust the stage-five prose was supposed to build. The durable compliance architecture is stage-four consistent enforcement, wrapped in stage-five principle, with stage-one sanctions held in reserve for the smallest number of cases.

Law, Jury Decisions, and Civil-Disobedience Movements

The legal-ethics literature has used Kohlberg extensively since Jerome Frank’s work on jury deliberation in the 1960s. Juries that include reasoners at stages four and five reliably spend more time on the deliberation phase and produce decisions that are better calibrated to evidence than juries dominated by stage-three reasoning (“what would a good juror do”). Civil-rights lawyers including Martin Luther King Jr. explicitly invoked Kohlberg-style stage-five reasoning in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and legal scholars have traced stage-five argumentation back through Gandhi and Thoreau into Rousseau. Kohlberg himself was explicit that civil disobedience was the clearest real-world expression of stage-five reasoning: a conscientious refusal to obey a law that violates a more fundamental principle, made in the open, with willing acceptance of legal consequences.

The applied version for platform designers: moderation appeals are a Kohlberg-stage test. A user at stage two files an appeal because they want out of the penalty; a user at stage three because they want the authority figure (the platform) to recognize them as a good person; a user at stage four because they believe the rule was misapplied to their specific case; a user at stage five because they believe the rule is wrong in principle and should be rewritten. Your appeals process that treats all four as the same kind of request is leaving enormous information on the table.

Product, UX, and Platform Design

Moral reasoning shows up in product design most visibly in the White-Hat vs Black-Hat distinction that is native to Octalysis. Designs that activate CD6 Scarcity, CD7 Unpredictability, and CD8 Loss Aversion are effective precisely because they work at stages one and two — they bypass the higher reasoning apparatus by exploiting fast, fear-driven responses. Designs that activate CD1 Epic Meaning, CD3 Empowerment of Creativity, and CD5 Social Influence work at stages three and above because they require the user to reason about their role, their community, and their principles.

The single cleanest applied example: Dark Patterns such as confirmshaming, forced continuity, and privacy zuckering are almost always designed to catch users at stage-one-or-two reasoning (“you will lose this offer if you don’t click now”) while the product’s stated ethics page is written at stage five. The users experience the contradiction as — correctly — manipulation. White-Hat product design is, in Kohlberg’s vocabulary, the discipline of matching your mechanics to your stated stage.

The Elephant in the Room

Kohlberg’s theory is not morally neutral. It is not a purely descriptive stage theory the way Piaget’s cognitive stages are; it is a normative ranking of moral-reasoning forms, with stage six explicitly treated as better than stage five, stage five better than stage four, and so on. Kohlberg himself was open about this: he argued that the higher stages were philosophically more adequate because they handled more conflict cases, applied more universally, and were more internally consistent. The field has mostly not argued with the “more consistent, more universal” descriptive claim; it has argued fiercely with the implied “therefore morally better” prescriptive claim.

The elephant is that most of your users are not going to reach stages five or six. Not most of your employees. Not most of your community. Not most of your customers. The empirical distribution is lumpy around stages three and four in Western samples, and lower than that in most of the rest of the world — and that is a distribution about moral-reasoning capacity, not moral behavior, which is worse.

Designing a product on the assumption that your users will rise to your post-conventional ethics statement is how founders get quietly surprised by their own communities. The stage four of your marginal user is the real ceiling of your culture. If you want the culture to be post-conventional, the architecture has to carry the load the users cannot, through the careful matching of incentives, consequences, and narrative structures to the stages actually present in the room.

The honest version of this is that a designer who understands Kohlberg is not trying to get the user to stage five. The designer is trying to build a system in which a stage-three user and a stage-four user and the occasional stage-five user can all coexist, none of them feels condescended to, and the behavior the system produces is closer to what a stage-five reasoner would endorse — even though almost none of the users are themselves operating at stage five. That is a harder design problem than the one most founders think they are solving when they write their ethics page.

How to Apply Kohlberg’s Stages with the Octalysis Framework

This is where Kohlberg becomes a practical design diagnostic rather than an academic framework. Every one of the 8 Core Drives of the Octalysis Framework activates with different force at different Kohlberg stages, and matching your drives to the reasoning stages actually present in your user base is the entire applied art.

Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling changes content across every Kohlberg level. At stage one and two, “epic meaning” reads as threat or reward (“if you don’t do this, something bad happens to the cause”). At stages three and four, it reads as role obligation (“a good community member contributes to the cause”). At stage five, it reads as principled alignment (“the cause embodies values I freely choose and the platform is the current best instrument for those values”). Designers who write stage-five Epic Meaning copy for a stage-three user base produce the characteristic “cringe” response; designers who write stage-two Epic Meaning (“don’t be left behind”) to a stage-five audience sound manipulative.

Core Drive 2: Development & Accomplishment is mechanically stage-agnostic — a progress bar works at every stage — but its motivational meaning changes sharply. At stages one and two, accomplishment is the literal reward. At stage three, it is social recognition in the eyes of peers and authority figures. At stage four, it is demonstrated competence in a defined role. At stages five and six, it is self-actualization against self-chosen standards, largely independent of external recognition. The same XP bar is a different behavioral instrument at each stage. Designing CD2 systems without asking which stage you are implicitly addressing produces the “engagement theater” failure mode: measurable completion of tasks that users do not report as meaningful because the mechanical reward is aimed at a stage they are not occupying.

Core Drive 3: Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback lights up most reliably at stage four and above. Stage-one and stage-two reasoners tend to treat creative-freedom affordances as loopholes (how can I use this to get what I want); stage-three reasoners use them to perform their role well (the creative act is read as role-appropriate behavior); stage-four-and-above reasoners use creative affordances to express chosen values. If your community guidelines constrain CD3 to stage-three social-role-appropriate output (SafeSearch, reputation-gating, default community-standards), you suppress the post-conventional expressive behavior that makes platforms culturally important. Reddit’s post-2020 policy drift is a textbook case of CD3 being mechanically tuned for stage-three role-appropriateness at the cost of stage-four-and-five creative latitude.

Core Drive 4: Ownership & Possession is morally stage-sensitive in a way the Octalysis literature has historically under-emphasized. At stage two, ownership is literal (“my stuff, not yours”). At stage three, ownership becomes social identity (“my account, my reputation, my badges in front of my peers”). At stage four, it becomes institutional role (“the custodian of this part of the system”). At stage five, it becomes principled stewardship (“I am trusted with this resource on behalf of the community”). Platforms that design CD4 assuming stage-two ownership (raw asset possession) run into predictable trouble when the users reason at stage three or higher, because the design signals that the platform sees them as acquisitive self-interested agents and not as the role-holders or stewards they experience themselves as being.

Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness is the single biggest delta across Kohlberg’s stages. At stages one and two, social influence is pure reward and sanction (likes, shame, status). At stage three, it becomes the central mechanism of moral reasoning itself — this is the stage named “interpersonal accord” for a reason. At stage four, it expands into the social order (what a good citizen does). At stage five, it becomes principled mutual respect among agents who have chosen their community. Social-proof CTAs, leaderboards, and peer-comparison tools read completely differently at each stage; the stage-three user reads “your friends are doing X” as a moral argument, the stage-five user reads it as marketing.

Core Drive 6: Scarcity & Impatience, CD7: Unpredictability & Curiosity, and CD8: Loss & Avoidance — the three Black-Hat drives — work primarily at the pre-conventional level. They bypass moral reasoning rather than activate it. A user at stage four can recognize a scarcity mechanic intellectually as such and still feel the pull of it, because the pull is running through fast emotional circuitry that does not route through the deliberative moral system. This is precisely why Black-Hat design is so effective and so corrosive: it works at the stage below the one the user would reflectively endorse. Designers who stack CD6/7/8 mechanics on top of a stage-five ethics statement generate the single most reliable source of user betrayal, because the user experiences the mechanics at stage two while reading the ethics at stage five, and correctly concludes that the platform’s stated values are theatrical.

The designer’s diagnostic sentence: my system is asking users to reason at stage X, enforcing at stage Y, and rewarding at stage Z — and whenever those three numbers disagree, the user experiences the gap as manipulation. Matching X, Y, and Z across the 8 Core Drives is the entire applied art of Kohlberg-aware design.

Practical Steps to Apply Kohlberg’s Theory

If you want to use Kohlberg at the level of your next design review, here is the checklist I run with clients at the Octalysis Group. It is organized as a single five-step diagnostic.

Step 1: Identify the stage distribution of your user base honestly. Most consumer platforms have a user base with a modal reasoning stage between two and four, with very long tails on either side. Most enterprise platforms have employees with a modal stage between three and four, with explicit role-defined expectations. Most communities of practice (open-source, scientific, professional) have modal stages between four and five. You do not need a DIT to estimate this; you need to read twenty recent user complaints and notice which stage the reasoning sits at. Write the modal stage down. Write the long-tail stages down.

Step 2: Audit your product’s stated stage. Read your mission statement, your ethics page, your community guidelines, and your onboarding copy. Score the reasoning stage each piece of text implicitly invokes. Most startup ethics pages score at stage five. Most community guidelines score at stage four. Most onboarding copy scores at stage two (here is what you get; here is what you avoid). The gap between your stated-stage cascade and the stage distribution in Step 1 is where your users experience dissonance.

Step 3: Audit your product’s enforced stage. For each of the 8 Core Drives, list the Game Techniques you actually deploy. Is the leaderboard a stage-three social-accord instrument or a stage-two pure-reward instrument? Is the streak a stage-four commitment device or a stage-two loss-avoidance trap? Is the XP bar a stage-four role-progression marker or a stage-two variable-reward conditioner? The enforced-stage cascade is almost always lower than the stated-stage cascade, and the gap between them is the measurable “manipulation” users report when they churn.

Step 4: Close the stage gap on the drive-by-drive level. For each Core Drive where stated and enforced stages diverge by more than one, choose one direction and align: either rewrite the copy to match the mechanic (honest but often unflattering) or rebuild the mechanic to match the copy (expensive but usually compounds). There is no third option that preserves trust. The platforms that compound reputation long-term invariably rebuild the mechanic; the platforms that optimize short-term conversion invariably rewrite the copy, and live with the consequence.

Step 5: Design a deliberate stage-ladder into your user journey. The most durable platforms do not ask users to reason at a single stage. They design onboarding at stage two (clear rewards, clear costs), mid-funnel engagement at stage three (social belonging, role identity), power-user retention at stage four (responsibility for the community), and community leadership at stage five (principled stewardship). Each rung offers the user the next stage’s vocabulary in a non-coercive way; users move up when ready, and those who never do still have a functioning experience at their current stage. This is the Just Community architecture ported to product, and it is the closest thing to a replicated long-term engagement strategy in the behavioral-design canon.

Closing Thoughts

Kohlberg is the theorist designers most often quote and least often use. His stages get cited in ethics decks and compliance trainings; his actual diagnostic — which stage is your user reasoning from, and which stage is your design implicitly demanding — almost never makes it into design review. The reason is that the honest version of the diagnostic is uncomfortable: it tells you that your beautifully-written ethics page is stage-five posturing on a stage-two mechanic, that the gap is visible to your users, and that they will eventually punish you for it.

The fifty-year empirical verdict on Kohlberg is modest. The stage architecture is real but narrower than he claimed. The sequence is invariant but shorter than he thought. The post-conventional ceiling is legitimate but rare. The scoring rubric was genuinely biased toward justice and away from care. The cultural generalization does not hold for traditional societies. And the judgment-action gap is permanent — reasoning well does not mean behaving well. Despite all of this, the theory is still the single best vocabulary we have for describing the moral-stage diversity present in any nontrivial user base, and for diagnosing the manipulative edges of design choices that pretend stage neutrality.

If you design systems people live inside, you owe your users the stage alignment Kohlberg describes: state your stage, enforce your stage, reward your stage, and when you must choose between raising the stated stage and raising the enforced stage, raise the enforced stage. That single commitment is the difference between a platform that compounds trust and a platform that consumes it.

Frequently Asked Questions About Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

What are the six stages of Kohlberg’s moral development in order?

The six stages, in ascending order across three levels, are: Stage 1 — Obedience and Punishment Orientation; Stage 2 — Instrumental Exchange / Self-Interest; Stage 3 — Interpersonal Accord / “Good Boy, Good Girl” Orientation; Stage 4 — Law and Order / Social-System Orientation; Stage 5 — Social Contract / Legalistic Orientation; and Stage 6 — Universal Ethical Principles. Stages 1-2 form the pre-conventional level, 3-4 the conventional level, and 5-6 the post-conventional level.

Who was Lawrence Kohlberg?

Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) was an American developmental psychologist who spent most of his career at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1958 with a dissertation that contained the earliest version of his six-stage theory. He founded the Harvard Center for Moral Education in 1974 and remained the dominant figure in moral psychology until his death. His work extended Jean Piaget’s cognitive-developmental tradition into adult moral reasoning.

What is the Heinz dilemma?

The Heinz dilemma is Kohlberg’s most famous moral thought-experiment. A man named Heinz has a dying wife who might be saved by a cancer drug a local pharmacist is selling for ten times its production cost. Unable to raise the full price, Heinz breaks in to steal the drug. Subjects are asked whether Heinz was right to do so, and why. The reasoning determines the Kohlberg stage score, not the yes-or-no answer itself.

What is Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg?

In her 1982 book In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan argued that Kohlberg’s original sample of 72 boys produced a scoring rubric biased toward an “ethic of justice” (rights, rules, universalizability) that systematically under-scored an alternative “ethic of care” (relationship, context, particular responsibility). Women tended to reason in the care mode and consequently scored lower on the Moral Judgment Interview. Subsequent meta-analyses (Jaffee & Hyde 2000) found smaller gender effects than Gilligan initially argued, but the critique was instrumental in forcing the revision of Kohlberg’s scoring manual.

What stage of moral development do most adults reach?

The empirical consensus, based on longitudinal studies using the Moral Judgment Interview and the Defining Issues Test, is that most adults stabilize at stages three or four. Stage five reasoning appears in a minority of post-college samples, and stage six is so rare that Kohlberg himself treated it mostly as a theoretical endpoint rather than a measurable stage in his later scoring manuals. The stage distribution is also strongly affected by education, cultural context, and exposure to moral-reasoning challenges.

Is Kohlberg’s theory still used today?

Yes, though mostly in modified form. James Rest’s Defining Issues Test, Georg Lind’s Moral Competence Test, and the Neo-Kohlbergian tradition led by Darcia Narvaez and Steven Thoma are all active successors. The theory is widely used in professional-ethics training (medicine, accounting, law, military), in character education research, and as a diagnostic in moral-psychology research. Pure Kohlbergian stage scoring using the Standard Issue Scoring Manual is less common than it was in the 1980s, but the stage vocabulary remains foundational.

How is Kohlberg different from Piaget’s moral development theory?

Jean Piaget proposed two stages of moral development in his 1932 book The Moral Judgment of the Child: heteronomous morality (rules as fixed and externally imposed) and autonomous morality (rules as mutual agreements among peers). Kohlberg extended this into six stages spanning adolescence and adulthood, adding the post-conventional level (stages 5 and 6) that Piaget did not address. Kohlberg’s stages 1 and 2 correspond roughly to Piaget’s heteronomous stage; stages 3 onward are Kohlberg’s own extension.

What is the judgment-action gap in moral psychology?

The judgment-action gap is the empirical finding, consolidated by Augusto Blasi’s 1980 review and confirmed repeatedly since, that measured moral reasoning correlates with actual moral behavior at only r = 0.30 to 0.40. Knowing the stage-five answer does not reliably produce stage-five behavior. Milgram’s obedience studies, the Darley and Latané bystander experiments, and decades of organizational-ethics research all demonstrate that moral reasoning is only one component of moral behavior — situational forces, emotional state, moral motivation, and moral character are all independent moderators.

How does Kohlberg’s theory relate to the Octalysis Framework?

Each of the 8 Core Drives of the Octalysis Framework activates with different motivational content at each Kohlberg stage. Pre-conventional reasoning (stages 1-2) is most reliably engaged by the three Black-Hat drives — Core Drive 6 (CD6): Scarcity & Impatience, Core Drive 7 (CD7): Unpredictability & Curiosity, and Core Drive 8 (CD8): Loss & Avoidance. Conventional reasoning (stages 3-4) is engaged by Core Drive 5 (CD5): Social Influence & Relatedness and Core Drive 1 (CD1): Epic Meaning & Calling as role-obligation. Post-conventional reasoning (stages 5-6) is engaged by CD1 and Core Drive 3 (CD3): Empowerment of Creativity & Feedback as principled expression. Designs that deploy Black-Hat mechanics while writing White-Hat ethics prose produce the stage mismatch users experience as manipulation.

Can moral development stages be reliably taught or accelerated?

Yes, within limits. The Just Community schools, launched by Kohlberg at Cambridge Cluster School in 1974, produced measurable upward stage shifts in students relative to matched controls. Effective interventions share three features: exposure to reasoning one stage above the current one (not two or more), real-stakes dilemmas rather than hypothetical ones, and democratic community context where students must justify their positions to peers. Compliance training without dilemma discussion produces no measurable stage shift.

References

1. Kohlberg, L. (1958). The Development of Modes of Moral Thinking and Choice in the Years 10 to 16. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.
2. Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research (pp. 347-480). Chicago: Rand McNally.
3. Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on Moral Development, Vol. I: The Philosophy of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
4. Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on Moral Development, Vol. II: The Psychology of Moral Development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
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6. Colby, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1987). The Measurement of Moral Judgment, Volumes I & II (Standard Issue Scoring Manual). New York: Cambridge University Press.
7. Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
8. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
9. Blasi, A. (1980). Bridging moral cognition and moral action: A critical review of the literature. Psychological Bulletin, 88(1), 1-45. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.88.1.1
10. Snarey, J. R. (1985). Cross-cultural universality of social-moral development: A critical review of Kohlbergian research. Psychological Bulletin, 97(2), 202-232. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.97.2.202
11. Rest, J. R., Narvaez, D., Bebeau, M. J., & Thoma, S. J. (1999). Postconventional Moral Thinking: A Neo-Kohlbergian Approach. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
12. Jaffee, S., & Hyde, J. S. (2000). Gender differences in moral orientation: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 126(5), 703-726. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.126.5.703
13. Shweder, R. A., Mahapatra, M., & Miller, J. G. (1987). Culture and moral development. In J. Kagan & S. Lamb (Eds.), The Emergence of Morality in Young Children (pp. 1-83). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
14. Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814-834. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.108.4.814
15. Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293(5537), 2105-2108. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1062872
16. Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., & Damasio, A. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature, 446(7138), 908-911. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05631
17. Power, F. C., Higgins, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1989). Lawrence Kohlberg’s Approach to Moral Education. New York: Columbia University Press.

Related Reading from Yu-kai Chou

• Milgram’s Obedience to Authority: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide
• The Dark Triad: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide
• Servant Leadership: An S-Tier Behavioral Designer’s Guide
• Self-Determination Theory: Ryan & Deci’s Motivation Framework
• The Behavioral Framework Library — the complete index of pillars

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