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.
‘Why’ questions are semantically ambiguous. A question like “Why is the sky blue?” can be rephrased as either a ‘how’ (“How did the sky get its blue color?”) or a ‘purpose’ question (“What is the purpose of the sky being blue?”). This semantic ambiguity allows us to seek many kinds of information with the same ‘why’ question. As a result, ‘why’ questions have often been used to investigate people’s explanation preferences. From such work, we know that people will often prefer teleological over mechanistic explanations—a tendency that has been linked to many broader theories of human cognition. But are ‘why’ questions pragmatically ambiguous? You may, for instance, have a specific expectation about what “Why is the sky blue?” was really meaning to ask. Here, we show that (a) people have clear, domain-specific expectations about what specific questions are implied by ambiguous ‘why’ questions; (b) people have clear preferences for certain kinds of questions over others; and (c) there is a direct link between implicit questions and explanation preferences. Thus not only is “why” pragmatically unambiguous, but these specific expectations may shape known explanation preferences. To test this view, we finally show that people endorse teleological answers even when they are explicitly non-explanatory. In other words, people may sometimes prefer teleological answers because they interpret ‘why’ questions as ‘purpose’ questions (rather than as ‘how’ questions) and teleological explanations may simply better address these questions. We discuss how understanding ‘why’ may reshape our understanding of people’s explanation preferences and their consequences.
Communication between social learners can make a group collectively “wiser” than any individual, but conformist tendencies can also distort collective judgment. We asked whether intuitions about when communication is likely to improve or distort collective judgment could allow social learners take advantage of the benefits of communication while minimizing the risks. In three experiments (n=360), 7- to 10-year old children and adults decided whether to refer a question to a small group for discussion or “crowdsource” independent judgments from individual advisors. For problems which could be conclusively solved through “demonstrable” analytic or physical reasoning, all ages preferred to consult the group, even compared to a crowd ten times as large — consistent with past research suggesting that groups regularly outperform even their best members for reasoning problems. In contrast, we observed a consistent developmental shift towards crowdsourcing independent judgments when reasoning by itself was insufficient to conclusively answer a question. Results suggest sophisticated intuitions about the nature of social influence and collective intelligence may guide our social learning strategies from early in development.
Limits on mental speed entail speed-accuracy tradeoffs for problem-solving, but memory and perception are accurate on much faster timescales. While response times drive inference across the behavioral sciences, they may also help laypeople interpret each others’ everyday behavior. We examined children’s (ages 5 to 10) use of agents’ response time to infer the source and quality of their knowledge. In each trial, children saw a pathfinding puzzle presented to an agent, who claimed to have solved it after either 3s or 20s. In Experiment 1 (n=135), children used agents’ response speed to distinguish between memory, perception, and novel inference. In Experiment 2 (n=135), children predicted that fast responses would be inaccurate, but were less skeptical of slow agents. In Experiment 3 (n=128), children inferred task complexity from agents’ speed. Our findings suggest that the simple intuition that thinking takes time may scaffold everyday social cognition.
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