Re-examining Kohlberg's conception of morality in schizophrenia

Abstract

Introduction. Early clinical descriptions of and research with people with schizophrenia described apparent difficulties in moral judgement and sensitivity. However, this research failed to take into account the effect of cognitive deficits and symptoms on task performance.

Methods. We assessed people with schizophrenia on the Moral Judgement Interview, a task used in the earlier literature, alongside a battery of neuro- and social-cognitive tasks.

Results. Whereas people with schizophrenia perform more poorly on this task than controls, this is mediated by memory and declarative theory of mind, and also impacted by negative symptoms.

Conclusions. These results indicate that performance deficits on moral judgement tasks are not a universal feature of schizophrenia, but rather due to associated difficulties such as those in social cognition.

Keywords:

• schizophrenia
• moral cognition
• moral judgement interview

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at doi:10.1080/13546805.2015.1042966

Notes

1. Fifteen per cent of controls and 33.3% of clinical participants refused to choose one option, and indicated that both were equally bad.