Jacqueline D. Woolley

From simple desires to ordinary beliefs: The early development of everyday psychology ☆

We provide evidence for the claim that before young children construe human action in terms of beliefs and desires they understand action only in terms of simple desires. This type of naive psychology--a simple desire psychology--constitutes a coherent understanding of human action, but it differs from the belief--desire psychology of slightly older children and adults. In this paper we characterize what we mean by a simple desire psychology and report two experiments. In Experiment 1 we demonstrate that 2-year-old can predict actions and reactions related to simple desires. In Experiment 2 we demonstrate that many 2-year-old pass desire reasoning tasks while at the same time failing belief reasoning tasks that are passed by slightly older children, and that are as comparable as possible to the desire tasks they pass with ease.

Do monsters dream? Young children's understanding of the fantasy/reality distinction

Young children are often thought to confuse fantasy and reality. This study took a second look at preschoolers’ fantasy/reality differentiation. We employed a new measure of fantasy/reality differentiation— a property attribution task— in which children were questioned regarding the properties of both real and fantastical entities. We also modified the standard forced-choice categorization task (into real/fantastical) to include a ‘ not sure’ option, thus allowing children to express uncertainty. Finally, we assessed the relation between individual levels of fantasy orientation and fantasy/reality differentiation. Results suggest that children have a more developed appreciation of the boundary between fantasy and reality than is often supposed.

The form and function of young children's magical beliefs.

Research and common lore suggest that children subscribe to a rich world of fantasy, including beliefs about magical entities and events. This study explores how children use magic to explain events they witness in the real world. Children 4, 6, and 8 years of age were asked a set of interview questions designed to assess general magical beliefs. They were then presented with physical events and were asked to predict and explain their occurrence and to state whether they believed the events were magical. The extent of childrens magical beliefs, as measured by the interview, decreased with age. Regarding explanations of events, the availability of correct physical explanations for the events accounted for a significant portion of the variance in childrens claims that the events were magic

Revisiting the Fantasy–Reality Distinction: Children as Naïve Skeptics

Far from being the uncritical believers young children have been portrayed as, children often exhibit skepticism toward the reality status of novel entities and events. This article reviews research on childrens reality status judgments, testimony use, understanding of possibility, and religious cognition. When viewed from this new perspective it becomes apparent that when assessing reality status, children are as likely to doubt as they are to believe. It is suggested that immature metacognitive abilities are at the root of childrens skepticism, specifically that an insufficient ability to evaluate the scope and relevance of ones knowledge leads to an overreliance on it in evaluating reality status. With development comes increasing ability to utilize a wider range of sources to inform reality status judgments.

Young Children's Awareness of the Origins of Their Mental Representations.

A series of studies addressed preschool-age childrens ability to identify and remember the epistemic and imaginal origins of their mental representations. Study 1 revealed that children as young as 3 were able to differentiate imaginal from perceptual origins. Study 2 explored childrens ability to differentiate representations formed through inference from those formed through imagination and seeing. Results revealed that 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds differed significantly in their ability to identify and remember the sources of their mental representations. Identifying and remembering inference was the most difficult for all age groups. Results from Study 3 rule out the possibility that incorrect performance in Studies I and 2 resulted from an inability to remember the objects used in the tasks. Results from these studies indicate that children as young as 3 are able to differentiate mental representations based on fiction from those based on fact, but that this ability continues to develop throughout the preschool years.

The development of children's ability to use evidence to infer reality status.

These studies investigate childrens use of scientific reasoning to infer the reality status of novel entities. Four- to 8-year-olds heard about novel entities and were asked to infer their reality status from 3 types of evidence: supporting evidence, irrelevant evidence, and no evidence. Experiment 1 revealed that children used supporting versus irrelevant and no evidence differentially. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children without initial reality status biases were better at evaluating evidence than were biased children. In conclusion, the ability to infer reality status from evidence develops incrementally between ages 4 and 6, and children perform better when their evaluation is free from bias.

Where Theories of Mind Meet Magic: The Development of Children's Beliefs about Wishing

In two studies, we probed childrens beliefs about wishing. In Study 1, we gathered initial data on 50 3- to 6-year-old childrens concepts of wishing and beliefs about its efficacy, with both a semistructured interview and a variety of tasks. Results revealed considerable knowledge about wishing in young children, along with an age-related decrease in beliefs about its efficacy. Parents were not found to encourage differently the beliefs of children at different ages, nor were they found to begin actively discouraging such beliefs at any particular age. A moderate relation was found between environmental supports for wishing and childrens beliefs in its efficacy. In Study 2, we continued to probe these issues and also address the nature of the broader conceptual context in which children situate their beliefs about wishing. Participants were 92 3- to 6-year-old children. Results of this study suggest that children may reconcile beliefs in the efficacy of wishing with knowledge about everyday mental-physical relations by situating these beliefs more within their emerging beliefs about magic than within their theories of mind.

Children's conceptions of dreams

Children’s conceptions of dreams are an important component of their developing understanding of the mind. Although there is much that even adults do not understand about the nature of dreams, most adults in Western society believe that: Dream entities are not real in the sense that they are nonphysical; they are private in the sense that they are not available to public perception, and are not directly shared with other dreamers; and, dreams are typically fictional in content. Thus, children in our society must confront several dualisms with respect to dreams, such as their physical versus nonphysical, perceptually-public versus perceptually-private, and shared versus individuated nature. Thirty-two children, aged 3- and 4-years-old, were told stories about children who were dreaming about an object, playing with an object, or looking at a photograph of an object, and then were asked questions about the status of these entities with regard to these three dualisms. All children judged dream entities, photographs, and physical objects to be appropriately different in terms of physical versus nonphysical properties and in terms of perceptually-public versus private status. They also understood the fictional nature of dreams. However, whereas most 4-year-olds understood that dreams are individuated, many 3-year-olds believed that dreams are directly shared by more than one person. These findings contrast with earlier research characterizing children’s understanding of dreams as realistic. We reconcile these contrasting findings by discussing methodological differences, and we situate our findings regarding children’s understanding of dreams within the context of contemporary research on children’s theory of mind. Children’s conceptions of dreams are a component of their developing understanding of the mind, and have traditionally been used as an index of this more general understanding. Dreams are salient mental experiences for most adults, and may be especially so for young children. Certainly bad dreams or nightmares are a commonly reported childhood experience even among preschoolers. The

Developmental Changes in the Use of Supernatural Explanations for Unusual Events

The focus of this research is to explore the developmental trajectory of the propensity to see meaning in unexpected or chance events, and more specifically, to explore the origin and development of nonmaterial or supernatural explanations. Sixty-seven children aged 8, 10 and 12, along with 22 adults, were presented with scenarios describing unusual or unexpected events. They were first asked to provide explanations for why they thought the events occurred and then asked to rate different supernatural explanations (moral justice, God and luck) as they pertained to each scenario. Results indicated that adults spontaneously appealed to supernatural explanations more frequently than did children, and that this tendency to appeal to supernatural concepts increased with age. Participants of all ages frequently endorsed multiple explanations for the same events and were more likely to endorse supernatural explanations for positively valenced than for negatively valenced stories. Religiosity affected both spontaneous explanations and ratings. Findings are discussed in terms of how children acquire the explanatory systems of their culture.

Young Children's Sensitivity to Speaker Gender When Learning from Others.

This research explores whether young children are sensitive to speaker gender when learning novel information from others. Four- and 6-year-olds (N = 144) chose between conflicting statements from a male versus a female speaker (Studies 1 and 3) or decided which speaker (male or female) they would ask (Study 2) when learning about the functions of novel objects. Some objects were in gender-typing colors (light pink or navy blue), and some were in a gender-ambiguous color (yellow). The results indicated that children did use speaker gender to guide their learning, by either consistently choosing to agree with the speakers of their own gender or making choices that are associated with gender stereotypes about color. The findings are discussed in relation to how in-group preference and stereotype attributions might influence childrens learning from others.