ABSTRACT
The history of sciencewill record the latter decades of the twentieth century as the apotheosis of the cognitive-developmental tradition in developmental psychology. This tradition has its obvious source in Piaget’s genetic epistemology and in his remarkable research program on the ontogenesis of children’s logicomathematical and scientific reasoning. But the extension of the tradition’s influence to matters of socialization, and to domains of social cognitive development, owe as much to the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and his colleagues. Piaget (1932/1965) did, of course, pioneer the study of moral judgement in children, yet it was Kohlberg’s work that galvanized a whole generation of scholars to pursue the developmental features of moral reasoning in its several sociomoral manifestations, and to explore the implications of sociomoral development for educational (e.g., Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989) and clinical (e.g., Selman, 1980) practice.
