Culture moderates the relationship between self-control ability and free will beliefs in childhood

Zhao, Xin; Wente, Adrienne; Flecha, María Fernández; Galvan, Denise Segovia; Gopnik, Alison; Kushnir, Tamar

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104609

Cited by 31 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…Imagined alternatives seem to be part of social inference from the time that a norm is meaningful to young children. In support of this idea, Zhao et al (2021) found that younger children (4-and 5-year-olds) as a whole don't differentially evaluate the two girls in any of the three stories; they don't evaluate someone as nice or not nice based on the seeing the outcome (story 1) or based on alternative outcomes that could have been (stories 2 and 3). This suggests that there is no age at which children infer social meaning from the action or its outcome without imagining the alternatives, and by extension the social intent, of the actor.…”

Section: Heroes and Villains: Imagining What We Should Do In Relation...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Changes in imaginative capacity -the ability to entertain possibilities that are unusual, unlikely or non-"normal" -may lead to this nuanced view. Some indirect support for this claim comes from children's creative justifications for why someone might be able to do (or not do) something despite their desires (Chernyak et al, 2019;Kushnir et al, 2015;Wente et al, 2016;Zhao et al, 2021). Children's reasons cover a range of conceptual domains, they are not exclusively about desires or inner motivations.…”

Section: The Unpredictable World Of Our Inner Desiresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Imagination and Social Cognition in Childhood

Kushnir¹

2022

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Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this paper I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition in infancy and childhood. In section 1 I review a work showing that even in the first year of life, social cognition can be viewed through a nascent ability to imagine the physical possibilities and physical limits on action. In section 2, I discuss how imagination of what should happen is appropriately constrained by what can happen, and how this influences children’s moral evaluations. In the final section, I suggest developmental changes in imagination – especially the ability to imagine improbable events – may have implications for social inference, leading children to learn that inner motives can conflict. These examples point to a flexible and domain-general process that operates on knowledge to make social meaning.

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Section: Heroes and Villains: Imagining What We Should Do In Relation...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Unpredictable World Of Our Inner Desiresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagination and Social Cognition in Childhood

Kushnir¹

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Imagined alternatives seem to be part of social inference from the time that a norm is meaningful to young children. In support of this idea, Zhao et al (2021) found that younger children (4‐ and 5‐year‐olds) do not differentially evaluate the two girls in any of the three stories; they do not evaluate someone as nice or not nice based on the seeing the outcome (story 1) or based on alternative outcomes that could have been (stories 2 and 3). This suggests that there is no age at which children infer social meaning from the action or its outcome without imagining the alternatives, and by extension the social intent, of the actor.…”

Section: Heroes and Villains: Imagining What We Should Do In Relation...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For each new norm children learn beyond age three, imagining alternatives continues to be integral to social judgment. Zhao et al (2021) looked at how U.S. and Chinese 6-year-olds (as compared to adults) evaluate a person whose actions adhere to the following social nicety: when you do not know what other people like, it is best to leave them with options to choose from. To establish the basic effect, children and adults heard a picture-book story about two girls waiting in a snack line on two separate occasions.…”

Section: Heroes and Villains: Imagining What We Should Do In Relation...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Based on Luo and Baillargeon's (2007) results, 11‐month‐old infants do not do this. Additional studies (discussed below) show that it is probably not until age 5 or 6 that children think intentional inhibition is a possibility (Kushnir et al, 2015; Zhao et al, 2021). This limitation may also be adaptive for early social learning; the fewer possible alternatives there are for a person's behavior, the simpler it is for infants to infer its intent.…”

Section: Crossing Domains: the Physics Of Social Imaginationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Imagination and social cognition in childhood

Kushnir

2022

WIRES Cognitive Science

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Imagination is a cognitive process used to generate new ideas from old, not just in the service of creativity and fantasy, but also in our ordinary thoughts about alternatives to current reality. In this paper I argue for the central function of imagination in the development of social cognition in infancy and childhood. In section 1 I review a work showing that even in the first year of life, social cognition can be viewed through a nascent ability to imagine the physical possibilities and physical limits on action. In section 2, I discuss how imagination of what should happen is appropriately constrained by what can happen, and how this influences children's moral evaluations. In the final section, I suggest developmental changes in imaginationespecially the ability to imagine improbable eventsmay have implications for social inference, leading children to learn that inner motives can conflict. These examples point to a flexible and domain-general process that operates on knowledge to make social meaning.

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The consideration of cost in evaluations of moral praiseworthiness among Chinese children

Zhao

2023

Infant and Child Development

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Children recognise the praiseworthiness of others' moral actions from quite a young age. The work we propose here focuses on whether and how children's judgements of moral praiseworthiness may be affected by cost incurred by the agents. Recent work has revealed developmental changes in how children consider physical and psychological costs in their judgements of moral praiseworthiness. However, this question has only been examined among US children, and little is known about how much the findings can be generalised across cultures. In this article, we examine the consideration of different types of costs (psychological, physical) in moral evaluation by children in China, and compare to the US data. We choose to study children in China not only because it is a non‐WEIRD culture, but also because recent work has suggested that there are cultural differences between the US and China in terms of how children conceptualise desire inhibition and self‐control. This research will have implications for research on children's moral cognition across cultures.

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Culture moderates the relationship between self-control ability and free will beliefs in childhood

Cited by 31 publications

References 77 publications

Imagination and Social Cognition in Childhood

Imagination and Social Cognition in Childhood

Imagination and social cognition in childhood

The consideration of cost in evaluations of moral praiseworthiness among Chinese children

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