Herbert D. Saltzstein’s research while affiliated with The Graduate Center, CUNY and other places

Adolescents’ and young adults’ practical moral judgments about two interpersonal moral dilemmas, which differed in their moral complexity, were examined using two philosophical frameworks (deontological and consequentialist principles) as tools for psychological analysis. A sample of 234 participants (ages 14–16, 18–19, and 20–21) reasoned about two moral dilemmas, which had been experienced by a subset of adolescents in a pilot study, in two forms: Participants 1) provided open-ended decisions and justification from the perspective of an imagined moral agent and 2) selected a choice from nine fixed reasoning alternatives (half advocating one course and other half advocating the other course of action, plus a relativistic reasoning). The participants’ open-ended responses served as a foundation of coding systems and were analyzed using log-linear analyses, chi-square tests, and a binominal logistic regression. The combination of qualitative and quantitative methods uncovered unexpected but nuanced young people’s moral thinking. Results indicated that female participants were more likely than males to show a unique decision style: “restructuring” of the moral dilemmas/situations , and moral relativism emerged only when asked to select a choice from nine reasoning alternatives and was primarily evidenced among the younger (aged 18–19) female college students.

This paper reports young (3–5 year-olds’) children’s cognitive and affective understanding of actual moral (harm to others) and prudential (harm to self) transgressions in the family, as reported by the parent, but in a way that provides the child the opportunity to reflect on and reason about the actual events. A total of 38 parent–child dyads participated. Findings illuminate different levels of moral understanding during preschool years. Specifically, there was a sharp break between the understanding of 3 and 4–5 year-olds for both transgressions. However, across all age groups, the rate of increased relevance of the reasoning to the act was greater for prudential than for moral transgressions, and the understanding of own feelings as an agent of the transgression developed more slowly in the moral than the prudential domains. Unexpectedly, many 3 year-olds failed to understand the dangers inherent in prudential transgressions.

In this study, 232 (89 11- to 12-year-olds, 71 13- to 14-year-olds; 72 15- to 16-year-olds) students recruited from grades 6th–11th in an urban public high school participated in a study of eyewitness identification. The focus of this study was on the effects of age, gender and moral orientation on decisional bias and, as a secondary outcome, on accuracy (using signal detection analysis).The primary purpose of this and previous studies in this series is to uncover implicit moral decision-making in decisional bias. In this study the perpetrator, the bystanders and the foil were all females. Prior to completing the eyewitness identification task, participants were given instructions that emphasized either (a) fairness and crime prevention, or (b) neither. These instructions had no discernible effect on accuracy but, as in past studies, younger participants (below the age of 13) had lower decisional criteria, resulting in a higher rate of false alarms/positives. Further, those who judged the transgression as worse had a lower decisional criterion, indicating more false alarms. Females were more accurate than the males in identifying the female perpetrator and scored significantly higher on how bad they would feel if they were the victim than did the males.

Decisional bias (false alarm rate) when judging the guilt/innocence of a suspect is offered as an implicit measure of moral judgment. Combining two data sets, 215 participants, ages 10-12, 13-15, and 16-18 watched the visually identical film involving a person setting a fire, framed either as (a) intentional but not resulting in a fire (BI-NF), (b) unintentional but resulting in a major fire (NI-F), or (c) intentional and resulting in a major fire (BI-F). After watching the film, participants identified seriatim who of six individuals was the perpetrator and how certain they were. The data were subjected to a signal detection analysis. Participants also explicitly judged "how bad" the perpetrator and act were. The implicit measure fit Piaget's claim of moral realism, shifting from judging wrongness according to the outcome to judging according to the actor's intentions, better than the explicit traditional measures.

Do children use their own moral judgments as a template against which to judge a parent’s fairness, and does that depend on the child’s age? Piaget’s concept of objective-to-subjective responsibility (a focus on outcome to a focus on intentions) was the template for the current study. The research question was how do children of different ages evaluate the fairness of mothers’ praise/blame for acts featuring different combinations of good/bad intentions and outcome. Forty-eight children (ages 3–11 years) heard two stories in which the outcome did not match the intentions. There were two versions of each story type: In one, the mother praised the child in the story; in the other, she blamed the child. Findings were that (a) children under 7 judged mothers who praised as fair and mothers who blamed as unfair regardless of the intentionality of the act, whereas (b) children 7 and older judged fairness based on consistency of mother’s reaction with the child protagonist’s intentions, thus using moral intentionality as a template to evaluate fairness.

Twenty-four parents, mothers or fathers, of 3-5 year old children in a pre-school nursery kept diaries of problematic encounters within the family. Two of these encounters were later presented as 'pretend' stories to that child who made judgments of and emotionally reacted as if he/she were the story actor including giving reasons for complying. Encounters were coded into different domains (moral, social-conventional, prudential, etc.), and children's reactions compared across domains within each pair of encounters. Instead of the standard "right"/"wrong" question, the children were asked why they would/wouldn't commit the transgression again. All children said that they wouldn't do it again, but their reasons were more often congruent or consistent with the nature of prudential than of other kinds of transgressions, especially than moral transgressions. This suggests that while children may know "right from wrong," they do not see it as relevant to their moral behavior.

These studies are based on the assumption that when adults, adolescents, or children identify someone as the “guilty” one (the person who committed the act), they are not only making an identification based on memory and thinking, but also a moral decision. This is because, by the act of identifying or not identifying someone, the eyewitness runs the risk of either convicting an innocent person (making a false-positive error) or letting a guilty person go free (a false-negative error). Our interest is less in the overall accuracy of their identifications and more in the balance of false-positive and false-negative errors. We have found in these and past studies that the balance of these 2 kinds of errors changes with age, and that this pattern may also depend on (a) the child’s general understanding of the purpose of the task, which appears to be “lost” on 7- to 9-year-olds, the youngest group studied, and (b) for older children and adolescents, how the act is described; for example, intended or not. In this way, we can understand that the act of identifying the perpetrator as a moral decision and not simply an act of perception and memory.

Why are young children particularly prone to make false positive errors or false alarms when identifying a wrongdoer? In three studies, the problem was approached using a signal detection analysis, focusing on the moral costs of false alarms, as understood at different points in development. The findings are as follows: (i) decisional criteria became more conservative, indicating fewer false alarms, with age in three studies; (ii) children's beliefs about the seriousness of false alarms and misses changed from (a) a non-moral concern to (b) a moral concern for misses to (c) a moral concern for false alarms. (iii) These findings were replicated in two demographically different communities. More critically, (iv) framing of the filmed event, for example, as a moral transgression (stealing) or a pro-social (helping) act (Study 1) and as intentional with little damage or unintentional with major damage (Study 3), interacts with age in influencing decisional criteria. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.