Osobine ličnosti i moralno rasuđivanje
Personality Characteristics And Moral Judgement

Summary/Abstract: The cognitive-developmental approach to morality represents a wider theoretical framework of this research. The study had as its objective to determine the relative contribution of some personality characteristics to moral judgement at different developmental levels. More precisely, moral judgement is connected with an individual's intellectual abilities, empathy and Eysenck’s basic dimensions of personality. Moral judgement was examined by Rest’s Defining Issues Test that consists of six stories, similar to Kohlberg’s moral dilemmas. The usual psychometric means were used for intelligence assessment. The Emotional Empathy Scale (Mehrabian and Epstein, 1972) and Eysenck’s EPQ were also used. The research sample consisted of 506 pupils, aged 16-17. Factor analysis and canonical correlation analysis were applied to the gathered data. The results confirmed that there is a relation between moral judgement and cognitive abilities, especially on the postconventional level. Some noncognitive properties of personality (empathy, extroversion, neuroticism) are of some importance for the conventional forms of moral thinking. The findings suggest that moral judgement is not in its nature an exclusively cognitive process which can be thoroughly explained by the Ethics of justice principles. In short, moral judgement is the act of a Person as a whole. Moral person cannot be reduced to a moral thinker and Homo Justitiae. All in all, the results show that a cognitivistic approach cannot offer a complete explanation of the moral judgement processes.

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