Humans (really) are animals: picture-book reading influences 5-year-old urban children’s construal of the relation between humans and non-human animals

Abstract

What is the relation between humans and non-human animals? From a biological perspective, we view humans as one species among many, but in the fables and films we create for children, we often offer an anthropocentric perspective, imbuing non-human animals with human-like characteristics. What are the consequences of these distinctly different perspectives on children’s reasoning about the natural world? Some have argued that children universally begin with an anthropocentric perspective and that acquiring a biological perspective requires a basic conceptual change (cf. Carey, 1985). But recent work reveals that this anthropocentric perspective, evidenced in urban 5-year-olds, is not evident in 3-year-olds (Herrmann etal., 2010). This indicates that the anthropocentric perspective is not an obligatory first step in children’s reasoning about biological phenomena. In the current paper, we introduced a priming manipulation to assess whether 5-year-olds’ reasoning about a novel biological property is influenced by the perspectives they encounter in children’s books. Just before participating in a reasoning task, each child read a book about bears with an experimenter. What varied was whether bears were depicted from an anthropomorphic (Berenstain Bears) or biological perspective (Animal Encyclopedia). The priming had a dramatic effect. Children reading the Berenstain Bears showed the standard anthropocentric reasoning pattern, but those reading the Animal Encyclopedia adopted a biological pattern. This offers evidence that urban 5-year-olds can adopt either a biological or a human-centered stance, depending upon the context. Thus, children’s books and other media are double-edged swords. Media may (inadvertently) support human-centered reasoning in young children, but may also be instrumental in redirecting children’s attention to a biological model.

Daily animal exposure and children’s biological concepts

“…We found that although children interact with their pets in a primarily social manner, this experience was related to a greater willingness to attribute biological properties to animals and also to incorporate animals and humans into a cohesive category of living things at an earlier age than observed previously. In conjunction with similar findings from experimental research (Ganea et al, 2014;Waxman et al, 2014), our findings help to support the hypothesis that treating animals as social creatures may help children to analogically understand animals as more similar to humans in other ways, including biologically (Inagaki & Hatano, 1987, 2002. Although further experimental research is needed, our research highlights the importance of understanding children's varied backgrounds and experiences as they relate to early knowledge growth.…”

“…This is similar to previous research comparing urban and rural children (e.g., Atran et al, 2001;Hermann et al, 2010;Ross et al, 2003;; these children are born into an environment that affords certain opportunities for direct animal interactions and cultural discourse about animals and biology and exhibits corresponding differences in biological knowledge. In addition, our correlational results mirror recent experimental work showing that specific experiences with different portrayals of animals can increase or decrease anthropocentric reasoning (Waxman et al, 2014) as well as children's learning of novel social and biological facts about animals (Ganea, Canfield, Simons-Ghafari, & Chou, 2014), suggesting that experience with animals causes changes in knowledge.…”

“…Thus, extreme personification actually encourages children to come to see animals as less biologically similar to humans (Hermann et al, 2010). In fact, children who were read an anthropomorphic story about animals exhibited more asymmetry in their biological projections from humans and animals than children who were read a realistic animal story (Waxman, Herrmann, Woodring, & Medin, 2014). In our study, both suburban 3-and 5-year-olds without pets did show an anthropocentric bias via one measure of asymmetry.…”

The cultural side of science communication

“…Although we ourselves have yet to show that exposure to different illustration conventions or epistemological orientations embedded in text has cognitive consequences (but see ref. 53), there are studies with college students showing that camera shots affect perspective taking (e.g., ref. 50) and inference making.…”

A Critical Discourse Study of a German Children’s Book Series: Representation of Social Actors and Construction of Legitimation

“…Owing to their prevalence, numerous scholars have conducted research on storybooks throughout the years. Some researchers (e.g., Dickinson et al, 2012;Sé né chal et al, 1996;Waxman et al, 2014) have looked into the pedagogic values of storybooks with respect to children's cognitive and linguistic development. Others (e.g., Crabb & Marciano, 2011;Hamilton et al, 2006;Stephens, 1992), however, have taken a critical lens and have examined the ideologies which storybooks embody.…”