Why do birds of a feather flock together? Developmental change in the use of multiple explanations: Intention, teleology and essentialism

Abstract

In two studies, 6-12-year-old children (Study 1: N = 58; Study 2: N = 38) and adults (Study 2: N = 22) rank ordered intentional, teleological and essentialist explanations for different behaviours of living-kind groups representing a range of biological kinds from plants to humans. Overall, humans elicited more intentional explanations, insects and plants elicited more essentialist explanations, and intermediate taxa, such as ungulates, elicited more teleological explanations. Children made fewer fine-grained taxonomic distinctions than adults, and the youngest children tended to reject essentialism. The 6-7-year-old children preferred to reason about living-kind behaviours from an intentional and teleological perspective; only towards the end of the elementary school years did children seem to incorporate a biological essentialism. Neither adults nor children were exclusively bound to a particular mode of explanation, but exercised 'causal flexibility' across different behavioural contexts.As the coach herds his little league team onto the bus, afternoon shoppers flock to the mall for a sale. Meanwhile, a fearless youngster hangs like a monkey from the jungle gym in the playground. Each of these fairly common events seems simple to imagine, although none of them is true in a literal sense. Kahn (1997) argues that the ease with which we are able to detect commonalities among humans and other animals reflects a natural human tendency to affiliate with nature, the biophilia hypothesis. Given adults' ability to use their biological knowledge to draw systematic analogies between the behaviour of humans and other animals, some variant of this capacity is likely to be a feature in children's thinking as well. In two studies, we focus on the development of biological knowledge during the elementary school years and into adulthood. Specifically, we investigate whether, during this period, developmental change and/ or stability characterize the use of three causal explanations considered to be central to an understanding of the animate world: intention, teleology, and essentialism. In

Religious Belief, Scientific Expertise, and Folk Ecology

“…In the first case, the origin of species is linked to a supernatural cause, but in the latter cases, it is linked to a naturalistic cause. Experimental evidence confirms that when reasoning about the diverse behaviors of humans and other species, 6-to 12-year-olds and adults demonstrate causal flexibility, the ability to shift explanations depending on the available evidence and the particular context (Gutheil, Vera & Keil 1998;Poling & Evans 2002). In Poling and Evans' studies, an age-related shift in explanation preference was apparent, from teleo-intentional to teleo-essentialist, which seemed to reflect changes in default biases, from intentionality to essentialism.…”

“…Such ontological constraints can inhibit or facilitate the acquisition of the novel knowledge structures that underlie Darwinian evolutionary concepts. The goal of a developmental approach is to specify the state of the initial causal principles and describe how they are transformed with the appropriation of new knowledge (Keil & Wilson 2000;Poling & Evans 2002;Vosniadou & Ioannides 1998). Next, we describe the emergence of these concepts in children whose demographic characteristics are similar to those of the lay-adults in the current study.…”

A conceptual guide to natural history museum visitors' understanding of evolution

“…School-aged children distinguish between functional explanations that satisfy physiological needs, and mental state explanations that satisfy desires, even if they often default to the latter. Six-to seven-year-olds, for example, reason that that animals and humans breathe because they need to not because they want to (Poling & Evans, 2002). In this analysis, the concept of goal-directedness undergirds both an intuitive psychology and an intuitive biology.…”

Are dinosaurs the rule or the exception?Developing concepts of death and extinction

“…Ross, Medin, Coley, and Atran (2003) argue that urban children are constrained by their lack of biological knowledge and forced to rely on a default anthropocentric heuristic in which humans and animals are perceived as distinct (Evans, 2001;Poling & Evans, 2002). Moreover, to urban participants death and extinction are not merely biological processes but are especially likely to evoke existential concerns ).…”

“…For the evolutionary biologist the human is just one animal among many. In contrast, for the urban participants in these studies the human is accorded a special status, one that elic-its existential concerns (see also, Evans, 2001;Poling & Evans, 2002). Ross et al (2003) argue that the anthropocentric perspective of urban populations is a consequence of an impoverished natural environment.…”