DOES THE DEFINING ISSUES TEST MEASURE PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA DISTINCT FROM VERBAL-ABILITY - AN EXAMINATION OF LYKKENS QUERY

This study examined the incremental validity of the Defining Issues Te st (DIT), a test purporting to measure moral reasoning ability relativ e to verbal ability and other major markers of the construct of genera l intelligence (g). Across 2 independent studies of intellectually pre cocious adolescents (top 0.5%), results obtained with the DIT revealed that gifted individuals earned significantly higher moral reasoning s cores than did their average-ability peers; they also scored higher th an college freshmen, who were 4 to 5 years older. The relative standin g of the intellectually gifted adolescents on moral reasoning, however , appears to be due to their superior level of verbal ability as oppos ed to any of a number of the other psychological variables examined he re. The hypothesis that the DIT is conceptually distinct from conventi onal measures of verbal ability was not confirmed. Investigators condu cting subsequent studies involving the assessment of moral reasoning a re advised to incorporate measures of verbal ability into their design s, thereby enabling them to ascertain whether moral reasoning measures are indeed capturing systematic sources of individual differences dis tinct from verbal ability. This idea also is relevant to other concept s and measures purporting to assess optimal forms of human functioning more generally (e.g., creativity, ego development, and self-actualiza tion).