TimeLine
The International Journal of Indian Psychology
ISSN 2348-5396 (e) | ISSN: 2349-3429 (p)
Volume 6, Issue 1, DIP 18.01.001/20180601
DOI: 10.25215/0601.001
http://www.ijip.in | January - March, 2018
© 2018 A Patel; licensee IJIP. This is an Open Access Research distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any Medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Person of the Month: Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987)
Ankit Patel
1
*
Born October 25, 1927
Bronxville, New York
Died January 19, 1987 (aged 59)
Winthrop, Massachusetts
Citizenship American
Known for Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral
development
Education
University of Chicago
Lawrence Kohlberg was, for many years, a professor at Harvard University. He became
famous for his work there beginning in the early 1970s. He started as a developmental
psychologist and then moved to the field of moral education. He was particularly well-known
for his theory of moral development which he popularized through research studies
conducted at Harvard's Center for Moral Education.
Lawrence Kohlberg was born on October 25, 1927, Bronxville, New York. He was an
American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development. He served
as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate
School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era,
he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget's account of children's
moral development from twenty-five years earlier. Kohlberg’s revolutionary Theory of
Stages of Moral Development helped establish his reputation as a brilliant thinker in the field
of psychology. Studying the topic of moral development was certainly not a new pursuit as
philosophers had been doing it for centuries. The subject had, for lack of a better description,
had become an afterthought when Kohlberg resurrected it. In doing so, he breathed new life
into the study of a very critical area of psychology.
Kohlberg’s early work on this theory was found in his 1958 dissertation. Of course, the
theory was expanded upon in the many years following the completion of his dissertation.
The theory built upon much of what Piaget had researched previously. The simplest way to
1
Clinical Psychology, Dept. of Psychology, Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar, Gujarat
*Responding Author
Received: December 25, 2017; Revision Received: January 15, 2018; Accepted: January 25, 2018