Today something made me think of how people tend to not be sorry for their actions until they are caught with repercussions, which TRP makes note of specifically in the context of women and relationships. It reminded me of Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, where at the first two stages an individual's decision making is based on the consequences of their actions imposed on them by an authority (e.g. a child's parents), and the personal gain they see. I was curious about whether I could find any literature discussing a connection, and a quick google search brought me to a pre political correctness/rape hysteria era article on - I shit you not - The New York Times, originally published in 1982. It's a brief overview / introduction to a book about psychological theory and women's development.

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/02/books/women-and-men-and-morality.html?pagewanted=1

Although the most interesting thing here isn't the article's content at face value, here are a couple of noteworthy bits.

For example, Lawrence Kohlberg, the Harvard psychologist who devised a six-stage sequence of moral development based originally on a 20-year study of 84 boys, argued that women tend to get stuck at ''stage three,'' where standards of morality and goodness depend on pleasing and helping others.

SJWs will have a field day with this - "Stuck"? Pleasing and helping others seems like something to aspire towards, what's his point? Well, there's nothing inherently bad about the stage, the purpose of this is to understand modes of reasoning. A moral dilemma relevant to TRP comes up when helping one person comes at the cost of displeasing another - the tools for handling such a situation are developed on stages five and six, where an individual recognizes social contracts and universal ethical principles. It doesn't seem far fetched that when you can't solve a problem at your highest level of development, you will defer to the next lower level.

when men and women create stories in response to illustrations that show people in varying degrees of physical proximity and distance, they tend to respond differently: as people are brought closer together in these pictures, the images of violence in the men's stories increase; as people are set farther apart, the images of violence in the women's stories increase. As Gilligan concludes, ''each sex perceives a danger which the other does not see - men in connection, women in separation.''

More or less your standard sidebar material, use distance, don't be a clingy time hoe.

For girls, Gilligan concludes, continuing a relationship is more important than continuing the game - a value that persists into adulthood ... The proper metaphor for female morality is the web of relations, says Gilligan, not the hierarchy of rules.

Keep in mind the book is written by a well recognized author with a Ph.D in social psychology. Expressing this kind of a view in today's world would be quite controversial. She is the founder of "difference feminism", which acknowledged the differences of men and women. Next we get back to issues relevant in present day society:

in fact a major strength of this book is that it does not commit reverse bigotries. Indeed, Gilligan takes women to task for the same moral failings that fueled Freud's original observations, although she explains them in social terms instead of anatomical ones. ''The essence of moral decision is the exercise of choice,'' she writes, ''and the willingness to accept responsibility for that choice. To the extent that women perceive themselves as having no choice, they correspondingly excuse themselves from the responsibility that decision entails.''

Damn. But these are issues we have already debated here. The most informative thing about this article is the assumptions they make about the reader. Along with the above quotes, consider this one:

Kohlberg's work is the latest in a long line of efforts to explain why women seem to lack courage and conscience, and why their judgments seem so different from those of men.

What, real effort has been put into this? It's visible enough of a phenomenon to attract real research and relevant people in the field of psychology? Not in 2015, everyone's equal and identical - there's nothing to see here, go home people!