Response

Dear Sir,

It is good the letter-writer is reading empirical reports in The Journal and is interested in integrations with cognitive psychology. Two aspects of the cited report, however, are not appreciated and can be pointed out in this response. The first has to do with developmental significance and the second with psychoanalytic relevance.

The developmental significance of the work is that the capacity of the preschooler to struggle with and, in some instances, resolve moral dilemmas—as well as individual differences in this capacity—were not known to cognitive psychology. Indeed, I served as editor of the classic monograph cited by the letter-writer of Colby, Kohlberg, Gibbs & Leiderman (1983) which provided the longitudinal data on moral dilemmas that summarized the accumulated and operationalized thinking resulting from previous works of Piaget and Kohlberg himself. The earliest age assessed and reported in that monograph was ten years, an age that served as the beginning point for a twenty-year developmental study. (I also remember discussions of reviewers at that time who wondered if a child as young as seven years of age could deal in any way with moral dilemmas.) The report in The Journal uses a different method than the Colby et al. technique, namely, a play narrative method designed to elicit cognitive and affective information in much younger children. The report provides new information that includes the following: 1) it applies the method to children