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For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's preference to engage with media that contains more mundane vs. more counterintuitive content. Children ranging from 3- to 8-years (N = 174), from the U.S. and Canada, were presented with pairs of books about animals. The two books in each pair were visually identical aside from their printed title. One book in each pair was described as presenting a fact that (according to validation data on children's and adults' beliefs in these facts) was relatively intuitive, and the other book was described as presenting a fact that was relatively counterintuitive. The youngest participants (3-4 years) demonstrated no preference in selecting books with intuitive vs. counterintuitive facts about animals, whereas older children (5-years onward) demonstrated an increasing preference for counterintuitive content. Combined with validation data on children's and adults' intuitions about the focal facts, these data suggest that children's preference to seek information that adults deem counterintuitive (at least in the domain of biology) increases with age as a function of changes in the strength of children's intuitions about what is possible.

Advocates for the use of specific labels to describe persons with disabilities presume that these labels fundamentally shape lay conceptions of persons with disabilities, and are thus critical targets for intervention. In two studies (N = 285) we test this presumption, by presenting participants with descriptions of persons with disabilities that use either person-first labels or condition-first labels; disability diagnoses were either made at birth or during the teenage years. For each description, participants judged how essential (consistent, deeply-rooted, broadly-ramifying) physical, sensory, or cognitive disability symptoms (Study 1) or diagnoses (Study 2) are to that person. Across both studies, participants judged disabilities to be equally essential to persons regardless of how they were labeled; this was robust whether diagnoses were made earlier or later in life. Although there may be other points of influence, these labels, which are primary targets of advocacy groups, do not seem to influence psychological essentialism of disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When deciding whether to trust someone's claims, how do children combine—over multiple interactions—information about that person's general behavioral tendencies (traits) with that person's ongoing (and changing) rate of providing accurate claims? Children aged 4–8 played 11 rounds of a find-the-sticker game. For each round, an informant looked into two cups and made a claim about which cup held a sticker. Children guessed the sticker's location and the sticker's actual location was revealed. Prior to the game, children received information that the informant was either honest or dishonest. In Study 1 (N = 201, 105 female, 96 male), the informant provided inaccurate information on the first five trials and then provided accurate information for the remaining trials (55% overall accuracy). In Study 2 (N = 144, 89 female, 55 male), the informant produced a less predictable pattern of (in)accuracy, but remained 55% accurate overall. The trait information children initially received about the informant's honesty strongly influenced their epistemic trust when they lacked additional information about the informant's reliability (the earliest trials). When children's first-hand experiences with the informant prevented them from making strong predictions about the informant's future behavior, only children approximately 7 years and older utilized trait information to guide their epistemic trust. These results demonstrate some similarities in children's causal reasoning about the physical world and their social reasoning. The results also demonstrate developmental patterns in how children weigh different types of social information at different junctures in social interaction. Public Significance Statement: When deciding whether to trust what someone told them, 4-year-olds relied on information about an informant's traits (honesty/dishonesty) when they had limited first-hand experience with that informant. By 7 years, children also relied on trait information when a person's future behavior was more nuanced or inconsistent with past behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we hear about a transgression, we may consider whether the perpetrator's individual circumstances make their transgression more understandable or excusable. Mitigating circumstances may reduce the severity of punishment that is deemed appropriate, both intuitively and legally. But importantly, in courts of public opinion and of law, mitigating information is typically presented only after information about a perpetrator's transgression. We explore whether this sequence influences the force of mitigating evidence. Specifically, in two studies, we examined whether presenting evidence about a perpetrator's background before or after evidence of their violation influenced how severely U.S. participants punished perpetrators. In Study 1 (N = 132), evidence about the perpetrator's mitigating circumstances reduced punishment only when it was presented before evidence about the perpetrator's violation. Study 2 (N = 316) additionally revealed this moderating effect of presentation order across a variety of premeditated and impulsive violations. These findings are consistent with person-centered theories of punishment and with the Story Model of adjudication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, developmental psychologists and educators have emphasized that learning about counterintuitive phenomena may be a critical driving force for cognitive development. Thus far, little is known about the specific content that children seek to enrich their knowledge. Using a novel book-choice paradigm, we directly examine children's preference to engage with media that contains more mundane vs. more counterintuitive content. Children ranging from 3- to 8-years (N = 174), from the U.S. and Canada, were presented with pairs of books about animals. The two books in each pair were visually identical aside from their printed title. One book in each pair was described as presenting a fact that (according to validation data on children's and adults' beliefs in these facts) was relatively intuitive, and the other book was described as presenting a fact that was relatively counterintuitive. The youngest participants (3–4 years) demonstrated no preference in selecting books with intuitive vs. counterintuitive facts about animals, whereas older children (5-years onward) demonstrated an increasing preference for counterintuitive content. Combined with validation data on children's and adults' intuitions about the focal facts, these data suggest that children's preference to seek information that adults deem counterintuitive (at least in the domain of biology) increases with age as a function of changes in the strength of children's intuitions about what is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children, unlike adults, deny that improbable events can happen. We test two accounts explaining this developmental shift. The development= reflection account posits that this shift is driven by an emerging ability to reflect on modal intuitions. In contrast, the development= intuition account posits that this shift is driven by changes in modal intuitions themselves, due to age-related changes in what people knowand how they sample their knowledge andmemories. These accountsmake competing predictions about howlong children and adults should take tomake possibility judgments. In Experiment 1, we asked 123 children (39 5-year-olds, 42 7-year-olds, 42 9-year-olds; 49.60% White) and 40 adults (50% White) to judge the possibility of 78 ordinary, improbable, and impossible events and recorded their response times. In Experiment 2, we tested an additional 52 adults (42.32% White) who were under speeded conditions and thus less able to reflect before responding. Our results favor the development=intuition account. At all ages, people judged improbable eventsmore slowly than ordinary or impossible events, and slow responding did not consistently predict affirmation over denial. Further, adults' possibility judgments did not change under speeded conditions. We also fit a drift-diffusion model to our data, which suggested that adults and children may sample different kinds of knowledge when generating intuitions. Our findings suggest that possibility judgments are often driven bymodal intuitions with little reflection, and that a developmental shift in what children know and how knowledge is retrieved can explain why these intuitions change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]