The interaction of nature and nurture
In response to the question of which moral stages a given child will pass through and when she or he will do it, Kohlberg adopted an interactionist position . he did not believe a child ‘s moral stages are produced entirely by genetic inheritance or entirely by factors in the environment. Rather, he propose that four principal factors interact to determine how high in the six-stage hierarchy a person will progress and when he or she will arrive at each stage. The first factor, and the one with the greatest genetic or inherited component, is the individual’s level of logical reasoning as identified in piaget’s cognitive growth system. The second, a personal factor that probably has both genetic and environmental elements , is the child’s desire or motivation, sometimes referred to as the child’s needs. The remaining two factors are entirely environment 1. The child’s opportunities to learn social roles and 2 the form of justice in the social institution with which the child is familiar. To understand how these factors interact , we need to inspect each in more detail.