Herb Saltzstein

Students and I are currently working on the following projects. These research programs are collaborative and evolving: (1) Children and adolescents' eyewitness testimony is being studied within a combined moral development and decision-making framework. In studying children's eyewitness testimony, we are primarily interested in the kinds of decisional bias [towards more lax or strict criteria for guilt] that children of different ages and cultural backgrounds bring to different kinds of eyewitness testimony tasks. It combines Piaget's theory of moral development, signal detection analysis, and cultural theory. We expect to extend this research to Northeastern Brazil where attitudes towards law enforcement are very different from the U.S. (2) We are also studying cross-race eyewitness identification within a combined social cognitive and decision-making framework, where different kinds of punishment are at stake. (3) A project being conducted with a student and a colleague at another university concerns implicit attitudes towards duty, using a version of the Implicit Associations Test.  We also hope to conduct this study in India, where attitudes towards moral duty have been reported to be different from the West.  (4) A fourth project concerns children's beliefs the fairness and efficacy of punishment, especially collective punishment. This research will be conducted in the U.S., Brazil and Japan, cultures where beliefs about authority and punishment vary widely. (5) Another student has conducted a study of children’s judgment the fairness of parental intervention as a function of the child's transgression, child's own moral reasoning and type of parental intervention. We hope to conduct this research in the U.S., India and Brazil. (6) Finally, a philosopher colleague and I have written critiques of a recent, very popular intuitionist theory of morality.  In this connection, I hope to develop research paradigms to further the investigation of the relationship between moral reasoning and affect.

Most of this research gives simultaneous emphasis to developmental and cultural contexts, which we see as intimately related. In general, I try to ensure that the research process is a collaborative one, between students and myself, and where possible, between us and investigators from other cultures.

Some representative published papers and conference presentations:

Saltzstein, H. D., Dias, M. de G., Millery, M. & O'Brien, D. (1997) Moral heteronomy in context: Interviewer influence in New York City and Recife, Brazil. In H. D. Saltzstein (Ed.) Culture as a Context for Moral Development: New Perspectives on the Particular and the Universal. New Directions for Child Development, #76. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

Dias, M., Saltzstein, H., & Millery, M. (1999) Moral reasoning in social interaction: A study of suggestibility. [in Portuguese] Estudos de Psicologia, 4, 199-219.

Saltzstein, H. D., Roazzi, A., & Dias, M. (2003) The moral choices that children attribute to adults and to peers: Implications for moral acquisition. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 38, 295-307.

Saltzstein, H. D., & Kasachkoff, T. (2004) Haidt's moral intuitionist theory: A psychological and philosophical critique. Review of General Psychology, 8, 273-290.

Saltzstein, H. D., Dias, M., & Millery, M. (2004) Moral Suggestibility: The complex interaction of developmental, cultural and contextual factors. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1079-1096.

Saltzstein, H.D., & Peach, R. Children's eyewitness testimony as moral decision-making. [Paper were presented at the Meetings of the Society for Law and Psychology, Edinburgh, July 2003]

Saltzstein, H.D., Peach, R., & Klein-Spring, T. (August 2005). Children's Eyewitness Testimony: A Moral Decision-Making Perspective. [Part of a symposium entitled, Deconstructing Identifications: Understanding Accurate and Inaccurate Eyewitness Decision-making, Meetings of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.]

Kasachkoff, T., & Saltzstein, H. D. [under editorial review] Reasoning and Moral Decision-Making: A Critique of the Social Intuitionist Model. (An earlier version of this paper was presented at the meetings of the Jean Piaget Society in Amsterdam, July 2007.)