Educational Psychology

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initial beliefs. Younger children were more easily influenced to switch opinions when an adult "cross-examined"
with probing questions; older children were more likely to keep to their initial position. Moral heteronomy was
revealed not by a child's views as such, but by the kind of dialogue a child has with adults.

A third idea that Kelvin learned was about children's perceptions of adults' moral beliefs. Saltzstein found that
even though older children (the 11-year-olds) showed more moral autonomy (were more steadfast) than younger
children, they tended to believe that adults thought about moral issues in ways similar to children who were
younger. In the "teasing" dilemma mentioned above, for example, the 11-year-olds opted much more often than 7-
year-olds for remaining loyal to a friend, even though doing so meant further untruthfulness with peers. Yet the 11-
year-olds also more often stated a belief that adults would resolve the same dilemma in a way characteristic of 7-
year-olds—that is, by telling the truth to peers and thus betraying loyalty to a friend. This finding puzzled Kelvin.
Why should older, and presumably more insightful, children think that adults are more like younger children than
like themselves? Saltzstein suggested an interpretation, however, that helped him make sense of the apparent
inconsistency:

...Consistent with our past research, children

attributed the kinds of moral choices made by younger

children to adults. In our view, this finding tends to

support a constructivist rather than a [social modeling]

view of morality, which would predict that the child's

judgments mirror (or develop toward) their

representation of adult judgments. [p. 41]

In other words, thought Kelvin, if children learned

moral beliefs by imitating (or modeling themselves

after) parents or other adults, then they ought to see

themselves as resembling adults more and more as they

get older. Instead, they see themselves as resembling

adults less, at least during middle childhood. This

would happen only if they were preoccupied with

"constructing" their own beliefs on the basis of their

experiences, and therefore failed to notice that adults

might also have constructed beliefs similar to their own.

Relevance: a framework for understanding moral development

The article by Saltzstein offered a way to understand how children develop moral beliefs, and especially to
understand the change from moral heteronomy to moral autonomy. By imposing controls on the procedures
(uniform interviews) and on the selection of participants (particular ages, particular societies or cultures), the
researchers eliminated certain sources of ambiguity or variability in children's responses. By framing their project
in terms of previous theories of moral development (Piaget’s, Turiel’s), furthermore, they made it easier to interpret
their new results in the general terms of these theories as well. In these ways the investigation aspired to provide a
general perspective about children's moral development. Providing a framework for understanding, you recall, is
one of the major purposes of many professional publications.

But note that the authors paid a price for emphasizing this purpose. By organizing their work around existing
general theory and research, they had to assume that readers already had some knowledge of that theory and
research. This is not an unreasonable assumption if the readers are expected to be fellow researchers; after all,
many of them make a living by "knowing the literature" of psychology. But assuming such knowledge can be an
obstacle if the authors intend to communicate with non-psychologists: in that case, either the authors must make

Educational Psychology 361 A Global Text