Research has largely centered around the theories advanced by Piaget, Gilligan and two other psychologists, Robert Selman and Lawrence Kohlberg . Gilligan, on gender differences in moral thinking, and the others, on developmental stages. Piaget's experiments involved a reasoning process which utilized mathematical concepts and object manipulation. There is no solid evidence to support that the reasoning strategies used in understanding concepts like conservation of volume are applicable to political or moral issues. In fact, some current psychologists believe that a generalized ability for people to make inferences from information learned across different subjects is not likely.
Different tasks seem to require different reasoning skills.
This generalization is consistent with an earlier criticism of Piaget based on observations that his theoretical formal operations do not appear generalizable across contents. Kohlberg's theory of moral development, which has six different levels of moral reasoning, makes a similar assumption. The hypothetical dilemmas used are at a more personal level than typical political issues and the assumption that these reasoning processes are similar should also be questioned. It is also not clear that responses to moral dilemmas involving fairy tales or other fictional accounts would necessarily be the same as real-life dilemmas. Gilligan argues that females are conditioned through cultural roles to value maintaining relationships - to stay connected.