However, there has been an alarming increase in reports of children who are anything but caring, children who hurt or even kill others without any sense of remorse, children who seem to be without a conscience. Teachers are reporting more uncaring behavior and acts of violence at school. To address this problem, one must first have a basic understanding of how moral development occurs. Piaget was interested in children's moral reasoning, and compared responses of older children with those of younger children. Lawrence Kohlberg expanded on Piaget's work and presented moral dilemmas to a group of incarcerated boys, and from their responses developed a theory of how moral reasoning develops.
Concepts connected to moral development include values, ethics, and morality.
Moral development has to do with not only what we think we should do in a given situation, but what we do when we think no one is watching or when we think no one will know what we are doing. In truth, we cannot be 100 percent sure what we would do in any given situation. That is, there is more flexibility and variation in how individuals traverse the stages. However, this theory has all the assumptions of stage theories in general and is aligned with the organismic world view. The term paper preparation notes in the previous lecture, Lecture 13, provided some suggestions on how to approach writing the literature review.