Preschoolers' Magical Explanations for Violations of Physical, Social, and Mental Laws

Browne, Cheryl; Woolley, Jacqueline D.

doi:10.1207/s15327647jcd0502_4

Cited by 42 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…Whereas children, much like adults, say that events that violate physical laws cannot happen (e.g., eating lightning), young children also say that events that violate moral or social norms cannot happen (e.g., stealing candy) (20)(21)(22)(23)(24). Not only do they judge these kinds of immoral events are "impossible," but also they even say that such events would require "magic" (18,19).…”

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confidence: 99%

Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Phillips

Cushman

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

123

159

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The capacity for representing and reasoning over sets of possibilities, or modal cognition, supports diverse kinds of high-level judgments: causal reasoning, moral judgment, language comprehension, and more. Prior research on modal cognition asks how humans explicitly and deliberatively reason about what is possible but has not investigated whether or how people have a default, implicit representation of which events are possible. We present three studies that characterize the role of implicit representations of possibility in cognition. Collectively, these studies differentiate explicit reasoning about possibilities from default implicit representations, demonstrate that human adults often default to treating immoral and irrational events as impossible, and provide a case study of high-level cognitive judgments relying on default implicit representations of possibility rather than explicit deliberation.modality | high-level cognition | morality | norms | possibility

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confidence: 99%

Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Phillips

Cushman

2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

123

159

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“…In the modal domain, young children are less likely than older children to affirm the possibility of events that violate empirical regularities but not physical laws, like catching a fly with chopsticks or finding an alligator under the bed (Shtulman, 2009;Shtulman & Carey, 2007). In the moral domain, young children are also less likely than older children to affirm the permissibility of actions that violate social conventions but not moral prescriptions, like singing "Jingle Bells" at a birthday party or wearing pajamas to school (Browne & Woolley, 2004;Kalish, 1998;Komatsu & Galotti, 1986). Both differences have tentatively been explained in terms of children's developing sensitivity to the limitations of their own experiences and intuitions.…”

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confidence: 99%

Cognitive parallels between moral judgment and modal judgment

Shtulman

Tong

2013

Psychon Bull Rev

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A central question in the study of moral psychology is how immediate intuition interacts with more thoughtful deliberation in the generation of moral judgments. The present study sheds additional light on this question by comparing adults' judgments of moral permissibility with their judgments of physical possibility-a form of judgment that also involves the coordination of intuition and deliberation (Shtulman, Cognitive Development 24:293-309, 2009). Participants (N = 146) were asked to judge the permissibility of 16 extraordinary actions (e.g., Is it ever morally permissible for an 80-year-old woman to have sex with a 20-year-old man?) and the possibility of 16 extraordinary events (e.g., Will it ever be physically possible for humans to bring an extinct species back to life?). Their tendency to judge the extraordinary events as possible was predictive of their tendency to judge the extraordinary actions as permissible, even when controlling for disgust sensitivity. Moreover, participants' justification and response latency patterns were correlated across domains. Taken together, these findings suggest that modal judgment and moral judgment may be linked by a common inference strategy, with some individuals focusing on why actions/events that do not occur cannot occur, and others focusing on how those same actions/events could occur.

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“…This effect was not expected and should be followed up by future work. It might be that 4-year-olds affiliated more strongly with the ingroup actors (than with the extraterrestrial actors) who intended to do something ''magical" (e.g., creating an object out of thin air) and, thus, believed-or wanted to believe-that both judges could be right (Browne & Woolley, 2004), perhaps because it would be interesting to have ingroup members with ''magical powers," whereas it may be less relevant for 4-year-olds to imagine the possibility of extraterrestrial actors with such ''abilities." Finally, we used a Likert scale measure as an indicator of how certain children were about their second-order judgment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Children’s developing metaethical judgments

Schmidt

Gonzalez-Cabrera

Tomasello

2017

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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a b s t r a c tHuman adults incline toward moral objectivism but may approach things more relativistically if different cultures are involved. In this study, 4-, 6-, and 9-year-old children (N = 136) witnessed two parties who disagreed about moral matters: a normative judge (e.g., judging that it is wrong to do X) and an antinormative judge (e.g., judging that it is okay to do X). We assessed children's metaethical judgment, that is, whether they judged that only one party (objectivism) or both parties (relativism) could be right. We found that 9-year-olds, but not younger children, were more likely to judge that both parties could be right when a normative ingroup judge disagreed with an antinormative extraterrestrial judge (with different preferences and background) than when the antinormative judge was another ingroup individual. This effect was not found in a comparison case where parties disagreed about the possibility of different physical laws. These findings suggest that although young children often exhibit moral objectivism, by early school age they begin to temper their objectivism with culturally relative metaethical judgments.Ó 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. IntroductionChildren are born into a world full of human-made laws (e.g., moral or conventional norms) and natural laws (e.g., gravity) and start to make sense of them descriptively during infancy http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2017.07.008 0022-0965/Ó 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author.E-mail address: marco.schmidt@psy.lmu.de (M. F. H. Schmidt). Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 164 (2017) 163-177 Contents lists available at ScienceDirectJournal of Experimental Child Psychology jo urnal homepage: www.elsevier.co m/locate/jecp (Baillargeon, Li, Gertner, & Wu, 2011;Dahl & Tran, 2016;Diesendruck & Markson, 2011;Hamlin, 2013;Schmidt & Sommerville, 2011). During early childhood, children proactively infer, construct, and reason about human-made norms (Göckeritz, Schmidt, & Tomasello, 2014;Kalish, 1998;Killen & Smetana, 2015;Schmidt, Butler, Heinz, & Tomasello, 2016;Schmidt, Rakoczy, Mietzsch, & Tomasello, 2016;Turiel, 1983). And regarding prototypical moral norms (e.g., pertaining to the welfare of agents), research suggests that preschoolers apply these rather universally, treat them as unchangeable entities, and regard moral violations as more severe than conventional transgressions (Dahl & Kim, 2014;Killen & Smetana, 2015;Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2012;Turiel, 1983;Turiel & Dahl, 2016). These early normative attitudes toward others' actions, however, pertain to first-order normative judgments-that is, judging actions and intentions as right or wrong according to a certain standard or norm (Schmidt & Rakoczy, in press). In the current study, we investigated children's developing capacity to make judgments about such first-order judgments (e.g., ''Xing is wrong!") in contexts of disagreement, that is, second-order judgments about whether only one person or two persons can be right about an issue on ...

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Preschoolers' Magical Explanations for Violations of Physical, Social, and Mental Laws

Cited by 42 publications

References 25 publications

Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Morality constrains the default representation of what is possible

Cognitive parallels between moral judgment and modal judgment

Children’s developing metaethical judgments

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