Cheryl Armon joins me to talk about her work in the field of developmental psychology. After discussing how she developed a passion for moral philosophy, entered the field, and met Lawrence Kohlberg, as well as the important theoretical distinctions between "hard" stages and "soft" stage models which they published about, we dive into the data Armon has amassed over her career on how people's conceptions of "The Good" complexify across the lifespan.

0:00 Introduction

3:07 Cheryl's Path to Developmental Studies

11:30 Studying Complexification of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful

17:15 Meeting Kohlberg

22:16 The "Right" vs. the "Good"

28:07 Asking People about the Good

30:57 Hard Stage Models vs. Other Kinds

38:24 Are There Domain-General Stages?

Stages of the Good

43:16 Stage 1. Egoistic Hedonism

47:36 Stage 2. Instrumental Hedonism

50:11 Stage 3. Altruistic Mutuality

59:17 Stage 4. Individuality

1:10:07 Stage 5. Autonomy/Interdependence

1:17:42 The Complexification of Value

1:19:47 Doing the Work Right

1:23:50 Taking Adult Developmental Reasoning Seriously

1:30:37 Conclusion

SOURCES

Cheryl Armon, "Ideals of the Good Life: A Longitudinal/Cross-Sectional Study of Evaluative Reasoning in Children and Adults." PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 1984.

Cheryl Armon, "Ideals of the Good Life and Moral Judgment: Ethical Reasoning across the Lifespan," in Beyond Formal Operations, ed. Michael L. Commons, Francis A. Richards, and Cheryl Armon (New York: Praeger, 1984), 357–380.

Cheryl Armon and Theo Linda Dawson, "The Good Life: A Longitudinal Study of Adult Reasoning," in Handbook of Adult Development, ed. Jack Demick and Carrie Andreoletti (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2003), 271–300.

To hear more, visit brendangrahamdempsey.substack.com

Handbook of Adult Development

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