Sex Differences in Moral Judgment
with their sense of justice. Recent research has not been directly germane to Freud’s position, but findings in a quite different tradition, Kohlberg’s cognitive developmental stage theory of moral judgment, suggests quite clearly that males and females use qualitatively different styles of reasoning in the resolution of moral dilemmas and the judgment of the rightness of actions. The research reported here was designed to probe some of the causes of these sex differences in moral judgment. The cognitive developmentalists have been more concerned with the description and determinants of universals of development than with individual or group variations. For instance, in several of the experimental studies of induced change (Turiel, 1966; Rest, Turiel, and Kohlberg, 1969; Rest, 1973) the question of sex differences in stage usage was not raised and no differences were reported. Kohlberg (1969) claimed, however, without substantiating data, that the modal adult male stage was stage 4 (authority and social order orientation) while the moda3 adult female stage was stage 3 (good boy/bood girl orientation) in his six-stage delineation. Subsequent reports have supported this view, as well as the view that these differences appear earlier. The stage 4 male mode and stage 3 female mode has been reported by Gilligan, Kohlberg, Lerner, and Belendy (1971) and Holstein (1973) for high school students, and by Haan, Smith, and Block (1968) and Alker and Poppen (1973) for college students. For junior high students Holstein (1973) reported males were modally stage 2 while females were stage 3. On an adult sample, Holstein found both males and females modally and predominantly stage 1+, although many more women than men use stage 3 reasoning. All of these studies consistently found more males at the highest stages (stages 5 and 6) and at the lowest stages (stage 2) than females, although the largest difference was invariable between stages 3 and 4. Kohlberg (1969) has claimed that the respective adult stages are functional for males and females. Holstein (1973) questioned whether the derivation of the stages from an all-boy sample has biased the system against females, citing that females less often follow the prescribed invariant sequence through the stages. The issue being raised in the present research is wheth-