Switzerland and Jean Piaget. Piaget was a careful observer of
children's thought and behavior in a wide variety of circumstances.
His work is so vast that any claim to describe it in a few pages must
fail. So I won't. I will instead talk about Piaget-for-us, which is
fine, since American psychologists have regularly borrowed from
Piaget what they liked and left much behind. For us, Piaget's central
claim was that increases in reasoning skill over time were punctuated
by shifts in perspective that could only be called qualitative change
from one stage (or "type," if you will) of thinking to another. This
is a thoroughly cognitive theory; Piaget could ignore the
behaviorists from his mountain fastness in Switzerland. For Piaget,
children start out as concrete and egocentric thinkers (infants even
have to learn that objects persist when they are out of sight). As
they gain more cognitive ability with age, they begin to be able to
"decenter" and see things from another perspective. But they are
still concrete in their approach to things. More experience and (here
is a key) some cognitive reorganization eventually allow most people
to become abstract thinkers.
So what does this have to do with Carol Gilligan and women?
We are getting there. Gilligan was a colleague of Lawrence Kohlberg at Harvard.
Kohlberg had applied Piaget's theory to the development of moral thinking. Borrowing
from Piaget's "preoperational/concrete/formal" distinctions Kohlberg came up
with the stage theory you see here.
Development | ||
Age Range | ||
Children develop the concept of object permanence and the ability to form mental representations. | ||
Children's thought is egocentric; they lack the concept of conversation and the ability to decenter. | ||
Children can decenter; they acquire the concept of conversion; but they cannot reason abstractly or test hypotheses systematically. | ||
Children begin to reason abstractly. | ||
source: Adapted from Piaget & Inhelder (1968). | ||
1) Avoid punishment 2) Gain Reward | ||
3) Gain Approval & Avoid Disapproval 4) Duty & Guilt | ||
5) Agreed upon rights 6) Personal moral standards | ||
based on the cognitive abilities of a person in Piaget's concrete
operational stage. Moral decisions are egocentric (based on me) and
concrete. So you can see how reward and punishment are the typical
bases of reasoning in this stage. The conventional stage is based on
the children's ability to "decenter" their moral universe and take
the moral perspective of their parents and other important members of
society into account. The postconventional stage is based on the
adult's ability to base morality on the logic of principled decision
making based on standards that are thought to be universalizable and
not dependent on culture. Kohlberg's system was based on extensive
research he and his students did with interviews in which they asked
children and adults to give the reasons they had for moral decisions
Kohlberg presented them with. So his stages and ages do not
correspond exactly from Piaget, but you can see a tantalizing
similarity.
Now we finally get to Gilligan. As a student of
Kohlberg's, Gilligan was taken by the stage theory approach to
understanding moral reasoning. But she disagreed with her mentor's
assessment of the content of the moral system within which people
developed. If you look at the table of Kohlberg's stages, you can see
the question being answered in the third column is one of justice -
the fourth stage gives this away with talk about duty and guilt.
"What are the rules of the game?" seems to be the issue at hand. From
her careful interviews with women making momentous decisions in their
lives, Gilligan concluded that these women were thinking more about
the caring thing to do rather than the thing the rules allowed. So
she thought Kohlberg was all wet, at least with regard to women's
development in moral thinking.
What set her off in thinking this was the fact
that in some of Kohlberg's investigations, women turned out to score
lower - less developed - than did men. Were women really moral
midgets? Gilligan did not think so. In taking this stand, she was
going against the current of a great deal of psychological opinion.
Our friend Freud thought women's moral sense was stunted because they
stayed attached to their mothers. Another great developmental
theorist, Erik Erickson, thought the tasks of development were
separation from mother and the family. If women did not succeed in
this scale, then they were obviously deficient.
Gilligan's reply was to assert that women were not
inferior in their personal or moral development, but that they were
different. They developed in a way that focused on connections among
people (rather than separation) and with an ethic of care for those
people (rather than an ethic of justice). Gilligan lays out in this
groundbreaking book this alternative theory.
Care | ||
responsibility to others | ||
that she is a person too | ||
self | ||
moral development for women. Like Kohlberg's, it has three major
divisions: preconventional, conventional, and post conventional. But
for Gilligan, the transitions between the stages are fueled by
changes in the sense of self rather than in changes in cognitive
capability. Remember that Kohlberg's approach is based on Piaget's
cognitive developmental model. Gilligan's is based instead on a
modified version of Freud's approach to ego development. Thus
Gilligan is combining Freud (or at least a Freudian theme) with
Kohlberg & Piaget.
In reading Gilligan and understanding her place in
psychology, you may yourself come face to face with an intellectual
difficulty. The momentous life decision that Gilligan looks at in her
central study was that of whether or not to get an abortion. It seems
clear from Gilligan's comments in her text that she is a supporter of
a women's right to choose. Those of you who agree with her will have
less trouble seeing the logic of her system. Those of you who
disagree will have to get past the disagreement on this important
ethical issue to see if there is anything interesting psychologically
in what Gilligan has to say.
Here is my pitch for the psychologically
interesting. Gilligan has shown that Kohlberg's (and Freud's, and
Erickson's) systems are based on a male-centered view. Kohlberg built
his theory based on interviews with males only. She has certainly
shown us the inadequacy of that. In addition, she has broken the idea
that there is only one dimension of moral reasoning. If there can be
two, why not three? Why not several? Finally, she has connected moral
decision making back into concerns about both the self and the social
environment in which the self lives.
One more item before we get to the book itself.
Most psychologists now disagree with the empirical claim that men and
women differ in their moral reasoning in the way Gilligan outlines.
Several studies have now found both men and women using both justice
and care dimensions in their moral reasoning. There have also been
criticisms of the rigor of her interview method of research. More
careful researchers are now cleaning up behind the trail she
blazed.
Gilligan's argument in the text
The first chapter is the most dense and willrequire the closest attention. But you will find choice tidbits here
about her opinion of Freud and Erickson. And you will find what she
uses of Freud's approach and what she discards. Her basic claim is
that women have no place in these earlier theories and that this is
why women's development has been considered an aberration from the
normal. Make sure you follow the logic of her critique of the "fear
of success" issue. This is a classic critique of psychological
theory: women are different, but they are not thereby inferior.
Toward the end of the chapter she introduces us to a favorite form of
argument: extensive quotes from interviews with interspersed comment.
As you read these quotes try to decide if you see the same thing in
them that Gilligan sees.
Images of relationship introduces us to a central
claim that Gilligan wants to make: men and women view relationship
differently. Current research agrees with Gilligan that there is a
difference, but the difference is more complex than Gilligan suggests
(or can suggest) in this chapter. The TAT study is a classical social
science style experiment. Different conditions produce a difference
in the measured variable. However take a close look at the percentage
differences she reports. How large are they?
In concepts of self and morality Gilligan
introduces the abortion study and lays out the sequence of
development you saw in the table above. You have two basic issues to
grapple with here. First, make sure you understand how Gilligan's
system is both similar to and different from Kohlberg's. How does the
meaning of conventional change from one system to the other? Second,
make sure you understand how the woman's self concept is involved in
each of the stages and in the transition from each stage to the
next.
We only read the first three chapters, since this
is the heart of Gilligan's argument. Those of you considering going
on in psychology, in women's studies, or in other social science
fields should at least consider finishing the book.