The level of cognitive and logical development
in the realm of children’s logical thinking, Kohlberg identified himself as a disciple of piaget. First, he was convinced that it is the child’s nature to pass though the cognitive development stages identified by piaget. He further believed that the achievement of a particular cognitive level in piaget’s scheme is a necessary prerequisite of the child’s achieving a particular moral reasoning stage.
To substantiate his belief, Kohlberg administered both Piagetian logical thinking tasks and his own moral- incident test to the same group of subjects. He discovered that children who did not succeed on a given level of pisget’s task almost never showed the moral reasoning level that paralleled the Piagetian tasks. In contrast, children who were in the upper levels of moral reasoning could almost always complete the parallel and the lower-level Piagetian tasks. consequently, Kohlberg concluded that the sort of logical thinking represented by piaget’s hierarchy forms the necessary foundation for the kinds of moral reasoning measured by his own moral-decision situations. This logical thinking component, then, is the maturational or “natural growth” factor-and perhaps the most powerful of the four factors that Kohlberg believed determine a child’s level of moral reasoning.