David Moshman

Biography

David Moshman is professor emeritus of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he taught developmental and cognitive psychology.  The primary focus of his research is the nature and development of human rationality, including logical, scientific, and moral reasoning, and the epistemic cognition that makes such reasoning possible.  He has also written extensively about adolescent competence and rights, education as the promotion of rationality, the intellectual freedom of students and teachers, the conceptualization of genocide, and the role of identity in group violence.  His work has appeared in many publications, including top journals of developmental, cognitive, and educational psychology.

Moshman is the author of seven books, including three with Routledge on issues of human rationality.  In Adolescent Rationality and Development (3rd edition, 2011) he addressed the development of advanced forms of cognition, morality, and identity in adolescence and early adulthood.  In Epistemic Cognition and Development (2015) he considered the development of knowledge about subjectivity, objectivity, justification and truth from early childhood through adulthood and the role of such knowledge in reasoning.  Most recently, in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Deliberative Democracy (2021), Moshman addressed the development of reasoning across the lifespan, the relation of reasoning to automatic cognitive processes, the role of argumentation in the promotion of rationality, and the prospects for democratic decision making in groups and societies.

Education

B.A., Psychology, Lehigh University, 1971
M.S., Developmental Psychology, 1975
Ph.D., Developmental Psychology, 1977

Books