Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-xbtfd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T19:47:03.516Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Understanding the adult moralist requires first understanding the child scientist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2010

Tamar Kushnir  and
Nadia Chernyak
Tamar Kushnir
Affiliation:
Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. tk396@cornell.edunc98@cornell.eduhttp://www.human.cornell.edu/che/bio.cfm?netid=tk397
Nadia Chernyak
Affiliation:
Department of Human Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. tk396@cornell.edunc98@cornell.eduhttp://www.human.cornell.edu/che/bio.cfm?netid=tk397
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Children learn from people and about people simultaneously; that is, children consider evidentiary qualities of human actions which cross traditional domain boundaries. We propose that Knobe's moral asymmetries are a natural consequence of this learning process: the way “child scientists” gather evidence for causation, intention, and morality through early social experiences.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , August 2010 , pp. 343 - 344
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bigler, R. S. & Liben, L. S. (2007) Developmental intergroup theory: Explaining and reducing children's social stereotyping and prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16:162–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonawitz, E. B., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Chang, I., Katz, S. & Schulz, L. (2009) The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Modeling the effect of pedagogical contexts on preschoolers' exploratory play. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-first Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, ed. Taatgen, N.A. & van Rijn, H., pp. 1575–80. (Online publication only, no publisher).Google Scholar
Bullock, M., Gelman, R. & Baillargeon, R. (1982) The development of causal reasoning. In: The developmental psychology of time, ed. Friedman, W. J., pp. 209–54. Academic Press.Google Scholar
Carpenter, M., Akhtar, N. & Tomasello, M. (1998) Fourteen- to 18-month-old infants differentially imitate intentional and accidental actions. Infant Behavior and Development 21:315–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D. M., Schulz, L. E., Kushnir, T. & Danks, D. (2004) A theory of causal learning in children: Causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychological Review 111:1–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gopnik, A., Sobel, D. M., Schulz, L. E. & Glymour, C. (2001) Causal learning mechanisms in very young children: Two-, three-, and four-year-olds infer causal relations from patterns of variation and covariation. Developmental Psychology 37(5):620–29.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hamlin, J. K., Wynn, K. & Bloom, P. (2007) Social evaluation by preverbal infants. Nature 450:557–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Heyman, G. & Gelman, S. (2000) Beliefs about the origins of human psychological traits. Developmental Psychology 36(5):663–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kalish, C. (2002) Children's predictions of consistency in people's actions. Cognition 84(3):237–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kushnir, T., Wellman, H. M. & Gelman, S. A. (2007) The role of preschoolers' social understanding in evaluating the informativeness of causal interventions. Cognition 107(3):1084–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kushnir, T., Wellman, H. M. & Gelman, S. A. (2009) A self-agency bias in children's causal inferences. Developmental Psychology 45(2):597–603.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kushnir, T., Xu, F. & Wellman, H. M. (2010) Young children use statistical sampling to infer the preferences of others. Psychological Science 21:1134–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leslie, A. M. & Keeble, S. (1987) Do six-month-old infants perceive causality? Cognition 25:265–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lutz, D. & Keil, F. (2002) Early understanding of the division of cognitive labor. Child Development 73:1073–84.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Meltzoff, A. (1995) Understanding the intentions of others: Re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children. Developmental Psychology 31:838–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oakes, L. M. & Cohen, L. B. (1990) Infant perception of a causal event. Cognitive Development 5:193–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Repacholi, B. & Gopnik, A. (1997) Early reasoning about desires: Evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds. Developmental Psychology 33(1):12–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rhodes, M. & Gelman, S. A. (2008) Categories influence predictions about individual consistency. Child Development 79:1271–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rhodes, M., Gelman, S. A. & Brickman, D. (in press) Children's attention to sample composition in learning, teaching, and discovery. Developmental Science.Google Scholar
Saxe, R., Tzelnic, T. & Carey, S. (2007) Knowing who dunnit: Infants identify the causal agent in an unseen causal interaction. Developmental Psychology 43(1):149–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulz, L. E. & Bonawitz, E. B. (2007) Serious fun: Preschoolers engage in more exploratory play when evidence is confounded. Developmental Psychology 43(4):1045–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schulz, L. E., Kushnir, T. & Gopnik, A. (2007) Learning from doing: Interventions and causal inference. In: Causal learning; Psychology, philosophy and computation, ed. Gopnik, A. & Schulz, L. E., pp. 67–86. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shimizu, Y. A. & Johnson, S. C. (2004) Infants' attribution of a goal to a morphologically unfamiliar agent. Developmental Science 7(4):425–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shultz, T. R. (1982) Rules of causal attribution. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 47, Serial No. 194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Siever, E., Gopnik, A. & Goodman, N. (under review) Did she jump because she was brave or because the trampoline was safe? Causal inference and the development of social cognition.Google Scholar
Sobel, D. & Kirkham, N. (2006) Bayes nets and babies: Infants' developing statistical reasoning abilities and their representation of causal knowledge. Developmental Science 10(3):298–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spelke, E., Phillips, A. & Woodward, A. (1995) Infants' knowledge of object motion and human action. In: Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate, pp. 44–78. Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Turiel, E. (1983) The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wellman, H. M. (1990) The child's theory of mind. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Woodward, A. (1998) Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach. Cognition 69(1):1–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed