INDOCTRINATION AND MORAL REASONING - A COMPARISON BETWEEN DUTCH AND EAST-GERMAN STUDENTS

This contribution presents the results of an empirical study aiming to test Kohlberg's complexity hypothesis. It is assumed that in complex socio-political surroundings, individuals are stimulated into higher s tages of moral judgements than in a less complicated environment In or der to test the hypothesis we compared the stages of moral judgements of Dutch and former German Democratic Republic (GDR) students belongin g to two types of schools. The Dutch (Amsterdam) group was split into VWO (pre-university) students and MAVO (low general secondary educatio n) students. The East German students attend the ''Gymnasium'' (pre-un iversity) and the ''Mittelschule'' (low general secondary education). The mean age of the Dutch VWO-students was 16.33 and of the MAVO stude nts, 15.39. The mean age of the East German ''Gymnasium'' students was 16.35 and that of the ''Mittelschule'' students was 16.00. The indivi duals of the Dutch and East German groups were asked to rate the moral problems in the Sociomoral Reflection Objective Measure. The scores w ere subjected to multivariate analyses of variance to detect differenc es between the groups. The results did not support Kohlberg's complexi ty hypothesis.