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Education often relies on an implicit assumption that decisions are made rationally, and focuses on situations in which there are correct answers that can be known with certainty. The proposal that decision-making is often narrative, especially in contexts of radical uncertainty, suggests important changes to education practice and new questions for education research.

Culture is a key determinant of children’s development both in its own right and for understanding the generalizability of developmental phenomena. Studying the role of culture in development requires information about participants’ demographic backgrounds. However, both reporting and treatment of demographic data are limited and inconsistent in child development research. A barrier to reporting demographic data in a consistent fashion is that no standardized tool currently exists to collect these data. Variation in cultural expectations, family structures, and life circumstances across communities make the creation of a unifying instrument challenging. Here, we present a framework to standardize demographic reporting for early child development (birth to 3 years of age), focusing on six sociodemographic construct categories: biological information, gestational status, health status, community of descent, caregiving environment, and socioeconomic status. For each, we discuss potential measurement items and provide guidance for their use and adaptation to different contexts. These items are stored in a repository of context-adapted questionnaires that provide a consistent approach to obtaining and reporting demographic information so that these data can be archived and shared in a more standardized format. The public significance of this work is to facilitate diversification of participants within developmental psychology by providing a framework for capturing demographic diversity.

Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children’s ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children? Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure to mechanism benefits children via the formation of abstract causal knowledge that supports epistemic evaluation. We tested 240 6–9 year-olds’ memory for concrete details and the ability to distinguish expertise before, immediately after, or a week after viewing a video about how combustion engines work. By around age 8, children who saw the video remembered mechanistic details and were better able to detect car-engine experts. Beyond detailed knowledge, the current results suggest that children also acquired an abstracted sense of how systems work that can facilitate epistemic reasoning.

Two studies ask whether scaffolded children (n = 243, 5-6 years and 9-10 years) recognize that assistance is needed to learn to use complex artifacts. In Study 1, children were asked to learn to use a toy pantograph. While children recognized the need for assistance for indirect knowledge, 70% of scaffolded children claimed that they would have learned to use the artifact without assistance, even though 0% of children actually succeeded without assistance. In Study 2, this illusion of self-sufficiency was significantly attenuated when observing another learner being scaffolded. Learners may fail to appreciate artifacts' opacity because self-directed exploration can be partially informative, such that learning to use artifacts is typically scaffolded instead of taught explicitly.

We propose that developmental cognitive science should invest in an online CRADLE, a Collaboration for Reproducible and Distributed Large-Scale Experiments that crowdsources data from families participating on the internet. Here, we discuss how the field can work together to further expand and unify current prototypes for the benefit of researchers, science, and society.

In four experiments, we investigate how the ability to detect irrelevant explanations develops. In Experiments 1 and 2, 4- to 8-year-olds and adults rated different types of explanations ab...

Cognitive scientist Mark Sheskin says the gap between rich and poor is often said to be a defining issue of age, that's odd, given that people are not actually bothered by inequality. Some fights for equality, such as against racial prejudice, are morally straightforward. But the battle against economic inequality isn't so simple. He recently explored this issue and concluded that a crucial step in fighting inequality is realising that it is not all bad. The trait they call inequality aversion emerges early in development and is found across many cultures, from city dwellers in the US to villagers in Peru and Uganda. The fight against inequality is most certainly a fight worth having. There are staggering levels of inequality in the world, and wide agreement that these should be reduced.

One of the core functions of explanation is to support prediction and generalization. However, some explanations license a broader range of predictions than others. For instance, an explanation about biology could be presented as applying to a specific case (e.g., "this bear") or more generally across "all animals." The current study investigated how 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 36), 11- to 13-year-olds (N = 34), and adults (N = 79) evaluate explanations at varying levels of generality in biology and physics. Findings revealed that even the youngest children preferred general explanations in biology. However, only older children and adults preferred explanation generality in physics. Findings are discussed in light of differences in our intuitions about biological and physical principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, the internet has become an important platform for many types of psychology research, especially research with adult participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. More recently, developmental researchers have begun to explore how online studies might be conducted with infants and children. Here, we introduce a new platform for online developmental research that includes live interaction with a researcher, and use it to replicate classic results in the literature. We end by discussing future research, including the potential for large-scale cross-cultural and longitudinal research.

By age 6, children typically share an equal number of resources between themselves and others. However, fairness involves not merely that each person receive an equal number of resources ("numerical equality") but also that each person receive equal quality resources ("quality equality"). In Study 1, children (N = 87, 3-10 years) typically split four resources "two each" by age 6, but typically monopolized the better two resources until age 10. In Study 2, a new group of 6- to 8-year-olds (N = 32) allocated resources to third parties according to quality equality, indicating that children in this age group understand that fairness requires both types of equality.

A central component of evaluating others as sources of information involves estimating how much they know about different domains: one might be quite knowledgeable about a certain domain (e.g., clocks), but relatively ignorant about another (e.g., birds). Estimating one's domain knowledge often involves making inferences from specific instances or demonstrations, with some suggesting broader knowledge than others. For instance, an American who demonstrates knowledge of an unfamiliar country like Djibouti likely knows more about geography as a whole compared to an American who demonstrates knowledge of a more familiar country like Canada. The current studies investigate the extent to which one potentially salient kind of knowledge - mechanistic knowledge - signals greater domain knowledge as a whole. Across four developmental studies, we find that both adults and children as young as six think that those who possess mechanistic knowledge about a basic level artifact category (e.g., clocks) are more knowledgeable about its superordinate level category (e.g., machines) than those with factual non-mechanistic knowledge (Studies 1a and 2a). We also find an analogous, yet delayed pattern with biological categories (Studies 1b and 2b). Together, these studies demonstrate that even young children, who possess little mechanistic knowledge themselves, nevertheless have a sophisticated sense of how knowledge of mechanism generalizes across related categories.

Many scholars draw on evidence from evolutionary biology, behavioral economics, and infant research to argue that humans are “noble savages,” endowed with indiscriminate kindness. We believe this is mistaken. While there is evidence for an early-emerging moral sense—even infants recognize and favor instances of fairness and kindness among third parties—altruistic behaviors are selective from the start. Babies and young children favor people who have been kind to them in the past and favor familiar individuals over strangers. They hold strong biases for in-group over out-group members and for themselves over others, and indeed are more unequivocally selfish than older children and adults. Much of what is most impressive about adult morality arises not through inborn capacities but through a fraught developmental process that involves exposure to culture and the exercise of rationality.

A long tradition of research in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries has investigated how people weigh individual welfare versus group welfare in their moral judgments. Relatively less research has investigated the generalizability of results across non-WEIRD populations. In the current study, we ask participants across nine diverse cultures (Bali, Costa Rica, France, Guatemala, Japan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Serbia, and the USA) to make a series of moral judgments regarding both third-party sacrifice for group welfare and first-person sacrifice for group welfare. In addition to finding some amount of cross-cultural variation on most of our questions, we also find two cross-culturally consistent judgments: (1) when individuals are in equivalent situations, overall welfare should be maximized, and (2) harm to individuals should be taken into account, and some types of individual harm can trump overall group welfare. We end by discussing the specific pattern of variable and consistent features in the context of evolutionary theories of the evolution of morality. UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Instituto de Investigaciones Psicológicas (IIP)

Inequality and unfairness are not the same thing. Starmans, Sheskin and Bloom summarize evidence showing that people are bothered not by economic inequality, but rather by economic unfairness.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the developmental origins of fairness. To do so, it first describes the relationship between fairness in particular and moral psychology in general. Recent evolutionary accounts of moral psychology have placed a particular emphasis on fairness, due to its importance in governing cooperative interactions between non-kin. Applying this account to development can explain otherwise peculiar features of how fairness emerges over childhood, most notably a “knowledge-behavior gap” in which children understand many features of fairness before they are motivated to behave in compliance with those features. Specifically, merely evaluating others is low-cost and has clear benefits even in infancy (e.g., it influences who we choose to learn from), but costly prosocial behavior is typically beneficial only at later ages, when a reputation for fairness becomes increasingly important for being included rather than shunned for mutually beneficial interactions with others.

Although humans show robust equality concerns across a variety of situations, there is ongoing debate regarding the extent to which any nonhuman species is inequality averse. In the current research, we test nonhuman primates' reactions to conspecifics receiving equal and unequal payoffs using a "no-cost" method in which subjects can respond to inequality without rejecting food. Specifically, we gave capuchin monkeys ( Cebus apella ) the opportunity to trade with one of two experimenters, each of whom offered the subject an identical reward, but had different histories of trading with the subject and a conspecific partner. An "equal" experimenter had previously given a conspecific the same reward that the subject had received, whereas the other experimenter was either an "advantageous trader" for the subject (giving the conspecific an inferior reward) or a "disadvantageous trader" for the subject (giving the conspecific a superior reward). By offering subjects a choice between experimenters, we removed several competing demands that may have masked the expression of robust equality preferences in previous studies. Even though there was no cost associated with expressing an equality preference, we found no evidence that capuchins differentiated between equal and unequal experimenters.

The evidence Gowdy & Krall (G&K) provide is more consistent with a biological markets explanation of human ultrasociality than a group selection explanation. Specifically, large-scale societies provide a better biological market for cooperation than do small-scale societies, allowing individuals to increase their fitness. Importantly, many of the quality-of-life costs G&K discuss (e.g., patriarchy) are not fitness costs.

Our moral motivations might include a drive towards maximizing overall welfare, consistent with an ethical theory called “utilitarianism.” However, people show non-utilitarian judgments in domains as diverse as healthcare decisions, income distributions, and penal laws. Rather than these being deviations from a fundamentally utilitarian psychology, we suggest that our moral judgments are generally non-utilitarian, even for cases that are typically seen as prototypically utilitarian. We show two separate deviations from utilitarianism in such cases: people do not think maximizing welfare is required (they think it is merely acceptable, in some circumstances), and people do not think that equal welfare tradeoffs are even acceptable. We end by discussing how utilitarian reasoning might play a restricted role within a non-utilitarian moral psychology.

Comparative research can shed light on the evolutionary roots and cognitive underpinnings of prosocial behavior by revealing not only positive instances of prosocial motivations in other species, but also the boundary conditions of these motivations. To explore factors that may constrain prosocial behavior, we examined whether brown capuchins (Cebus apella), which demonstrate regard for the welfare of conspecifics in other contexts, would behave prosocially in a minimal-cost instrumental helping task. We observed that when given the opportunity to share tokens that allow a conspecific to obtain food from an apparatus, capuchins showed no regard for another individual's welfare. Subjects transferred tokens to an adjacent chamber when the apparatus was present, but did so just as often when the chamber was empty as when there was a recipient present to obtain food. While capuchins are sensitive to others' welfare in some contexts, the current results suggest that they do not spontaneously produce goal-specific helping actions on behalf of a conspecific. The lack of regard for others exhibited in this context provides insights into the factors that may constrain prosocial behavior in capuchins and other primate species.

According to models of objectification, viewing someone as a body induces de-mentalization, stripping away their psychological traits. Here evidence is presented for an alternative account, where a body focus does not diminish the attribution of all mental capacities but, instead, leads perceivers to infer a different kind of mind. Drawing on the distinction in mind perception between agency and experience, it is found that focusing on someone's body reduces perceptions of agency (self-control and action) but increases perceptions of experience (emotion and sensation). These effects were found when comparing targets represented by both revealing versus nonrevealing pictures (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or by simply directing attention toward physical characteristics (Experiment 2). The effect of a body focus on mind perception also influenced moral intuitions, with those represented as a body seen to be less morally responsible (i.e., lesser moral agents) but more sensitive to harm (i.e., greater moral patients; Experiments 5 and 6). These effects suggest that a body focus does not cause objectification per se but, instead, leads to a redistribution of perceived mind.

A variety of theories have been put forth to explain the function of imagination, most notably that imagination engages and develops children's theory of mind and counterfactual reasoning. Here, we propose that a primary role for imagination is as a cognitive mechanism for efficiently generating new ideas without observing new evidence. Learners must generate hypotheses before they can assess the truth of these hypotheses. Given infinite possibilities, how do learners constrain the process of hypothesis generation? We suggest that learners represent abstract criteria for the solution to a problem and generate solutions that, if true, would solve the problem. As a preliminary test of this idea, we show that, in the absence of any fact of the matter (i.e., when neither prior knowledge nor statistical data distinguishes competing hypotheses), 4–6-year-olds (mean: 63 months) systematically converge on solutions to problems, consistent with an ability to imagine the abstract properties of causal problems and their solutions., National Science Foundation (U.S.) (0744213)

Infants understand harm and fairness in third-party situations and yet children require years of development before they apply this understanding to their own interactions with others. We suggest that the delay is explained by a life-history analysis of when behaving morally becomes beneficial. The human species is characterized by an extended period of juvenile dependence during which cooperation with non-kin is mostly superfluous. Later, as children age, moral behaviors supporting cooperation become increasingly beneficial.

Young children dislike getting less than others, which might suggest a general preference for equal outcomes. However, young children are typically not averse to others receiving less than themselves. These results are consistent with two alternatives: young children might not have any preferences about others receiving less than themselves, or they might have preferences for others receiving less than themselves. We test these alternatives with 5- to 10-year-old children. We replicate previous findings that children will take a cost to avoid being at a relative disadvantage, but also find that 5- and 6-year-olds will spitefully take a cost to ensure that another’s welfare falls below their own. This result suggests that the development of fairness includes overcoming an initial social comparison preference for others to get less relative to oneself.

Morality is a critical part of human society. This chapter explores the origins of human morality by examining whether nonhuman primate species share aspects of five domains thought to be important in human moral behavior—concerns involving harm, fairness, hierarchy, ingroup allegiance, and purity. Behaviors in the harm domain have received the most attention from researchers, and converging lines of evidence suggest that some primates express harm concerns. The domain of fairness has become a recent focus of primate research, with active debate about whether closely related primates share human-like concerns. Moral behaviors regarding ingroup allegiance, authority, and purity have received the least attention in nonhuman species, though recent work suggests that research with primates might productively pursue the ingroup allegiance and authority domains. Future primate research will continue to elucidate the nature of human morality, and should include an increased focus on the previously neglected domains of ingroup and hierarchy.

Young children often struggle to answer the question "what would have happened?" particularly in cases where the adult-like "correct" answer has the same outcome as the event that actually occurred. Previous work has assumed that children fail because they cannot engage in accurate counterfactual simulations. Children have trouble considering what to change and what to keep fixed when comparing counterfactual alternatives to reality. However, most developmental studies on counterfactual reasoning have relied on binary yes/no responses to counterfactual questions about complex narratives and so have only been able to document when these failures occur but not why and how. Here, we investigate counterfactual reasoning in a domain in which specific counterfactual possibilities are very concrete: simple collision interactions. In Experiment 1, we show that 5- to 10-year-old children (recruited from schools and museums in Connecticut) succeed in making predictions but struggle to answer binary counterfactual questions. In Experiment 2, we use a multiple-choice method to allow children to select a specific counterfactual possibility. We find evidence that 4- to 6-year-old children (recruited online from across the United States) do conduct counterfactual simulations, but the counterfactual possibilities younger children consider differ from adult-like reasoning in systematic ways. Experiment 3 provides further evidence that young children engage in simulation rather than using a simpler visual matching strategy. Together, these experiments show that the developmental changes in counterfactual reasoning are not simply a matter of whether children engage in counterfactual simulation but also how they do so. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).