Gender Differences in Moral Influences on Adolescents’ Eyewitness Identification

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Eyewitness identification
• gender
• adolescent development
• decision-making
• moral development

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Aiden Peleg for aid in collecting data, aiding in literature review, and analyzing data. Thanks to Jacob Spring for aiding in the coding of the data and filming. Thanks, are also extended to the school administrators, teachers, and students of the participating school.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Toni Spring

Dr. Toni Spring completed her PhD. at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York in Developmental Psychology in 2009. Dr. Spring has taught a variety of courses in both the education and psychology departments at Queens College, CUNY. Her initial interest in studying children's eyewitness identification within the theoretical perspectives of moral development and decision-making theory began as a senior researcher of the Children's Research Group at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation was on children's eyewitness identification within a moral development framework and she has continued doing research within that theoretical framework.

Herbert D. Saltzstein

Dr. Herbert D. Saltzstein completed his Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Michigan in 1961. He has taught at M.I.T., Sarah Lawrence College, Lehman College, CUNY and from 1981 to last year at the CUNY Graduate School when he officially retired. His initial introduction to moral development was while working as an RA on a research project on parenting and moral development where he first became acquainted with Kohlberg's writings. His interest in children's eyewitness identification began after seeing a documentary on the ‘Little Rascals’ case highlighting the fallibility of children’s eyewitness identification and the implicit relationship between eyewitness identification and morality.

Leeann Siegel

Leeann Siegel is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication. Prior to starting her doctoral program, she received her Masters of Public Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her research focuses on the effects of media information about health risk behaviors on young people's normative perceptions, beliefs and behaviors.