Keith Head

Modern democracies face mounting challenges of political polarization, institutional distrust, and rising authoritarianism. This perspective argues that a significant portion of this dysfunction traces to the moral-cognitive development of citizens themselves. Applying Lawrence Kohlberg’s stage theory and decades of empirical research using the Defining Issues Test (DIT), the research suggests that most adults reason at conventional levels, prioritizing group loyalty and deference to authority over principled evaluation. This developmental limitation helps explain rising political polarization, susceptibility to authoritarian appeals, and the erosion of democratic norms across modern societies. Education emerges as the strongest predictor of post-conventional development, with implications for civic education and higher education access. Addressing democratic fragmentation therefore requires consideration not only to institutional design and policy, but also to the moral-cognitive capacities that citizens bring to democratic life.

Parental alienation remains one of the most contested concepts in psychiatry, psychology, law, and social work, having been excluded from the DSM-5 and removed from the ICD-11 while continuing to play a substantive role in custody proceedings internationally. This opinion article does not revisit the scientific case regarding parental alienation but instead documents a distinct and underexplored problem, namely the pattern in which proponents have responded to critical scholarship through organized campaigns to retract, withdraw, or remove that work from the record rather than through the ordinary mechanisms of scientific debate. A search of the published record failed to identify any instance in which critics have initiated comparable retraction campaigns against proponents, who have instead engaged through conventional academic channels. The asymmetry documented here aligns with established frameworks on the suppression of scientific dissent and parallels mechanisms previously identified in tobacco and climate research. The argument advanced does not depend on resolving the underlying validity question, because the integrity of scientific discourse requires that disagreement be addressed through evidence rather than through administrative mechanisms designed for a different purpose.