Kristi L. Lockhart

Young Children's Beliefs about the Stability of Traits: Protective Optimism?.

Prior research has demonstrated individual differences in childrens beliefs about the stability of traits, but this focus on individuals may have masked important developmental differences. In a series of four studies, younger children (5-6 years old, Ns = 53, 32, 16, and 16, respectively) were more optimistic in their beliefs about traits than were older children (7-10 years old, Ns = 60, 32, 16, and 16, respectively) and adults (Ns = 130, 100, 48, and 48, respectively). Younger children were more likely to believe that negative traits would change in an extreme positive direction over time (Study 1) and that they could control the expression of a trait (Study 3). This was true not only for psychological traits, but also for biological traits such as missing a finger and having poor eyesight. Young children also optimistically believed that extreme positive traits would be retained over development (Study 2). Study 4 extended these findings to groups, and showed that young children believed that a majority of people can have above average future outcomes. All age groups made clear distinctions between the malleability of biological and psychological traits, believing negative biological traits to be less malleable than negative psychological traits and less subject to a persons control. Hybrid traits (such as intelligence and body weight) fell midway between these two with respect to malleability. The sources of young childrens optimism and implications of this optimism for age differences in the incidence of depression are discussed.

Children's Understanding of Uniformity in the Environment.

LOCKHART, KRISTI L.; ABRAHAMS, BARBARA; and OSHERSON, DANIEL N. Childrens Understanding of Uniformity in the Environment. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1977, 48, 1521-1531. Childrens ability to distinguish among those regularities in the environment governed by social convention and those governed by physical law was investigated in this study. 75 children from the first, third, and fifth grades were each asked a series of questions pertaining to 6 topic areas. 4 of these topics dealt with conventionality, one with moral rules, and another with physical laws. In each topic area such issues as the childs understanding of the convention, rule, or law and the childs belief in the universality of the convention, rule, or law were addressed by similar questions. 4 conclusions were drawn from the results: (a) Childrens ability to distinguish between social convention and physical law increases with age. (b) In learning to make this distinction, many children pass through an intermediate stage where they believe, incorrectly, that both physical laws and social conventions can be changed. (c) Childrens understanding of conventionality develops as an organized whole. (d) Some conventions are more difficult to change than others. Children are more reluctant to change moral rules than conventions.

A Bump on a Bump? Emerging Intuitions Concerning the Relative Difficulty of the Sciences

In 4 studies, the authors examined how intuitions about the relative difficulties of the sciences develop. In Study 1, familiar everyday phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics were pretested in adults, so as to be equally difficult to explain. When participants in kindergarten, Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, and college were asked to rate the difficulty of understanding these phenomena, children revealed a strong bias to see natural science phenomena as more difficult than those in psychology. The perceived relative difficulty of economics dropped dramatically in late childhood. In Study 2, children saw neuroscience phenomena as much more difficult than cognitive psychology phenomena, which were seen as more difficult than social psychology phenomena, even though all phenomena were again equated for difficulty in adults. In Study 3, we explored the basis for these results in intuitions about common knowledge and firsthand experience. Study 4 showed that the intuitions about the differences between the disciplines were based on intuitions about difficulty of understanding and not on the basis of more general intuitions about the feasibility or truth of the phenomena in question. Taken together, in the studies, the authors find an early emerging basis for judgments that some sciences are intrinsically more difficult than others, a bias that may persevere in adults in subtler forms in such settings as the courtroom.

Sensing the Coherence of Biology in Contrast to Psychology: Young Children’s Use of Causal Relations to Distinguish Two Foundational Domains

To what extent do children understand that biological processes fall into 1 coherent domain unified by distinct causal principles? In Experiments 1 and 2 (N = 125) kindergartners are given triads of biological and psychological processes and asked to identify which 2 members of the triad belong together. Results show that 5-year-olds correctly cluster biological processes and separate them from psychological ones. Experiments 3 and 4 (N = 64) examine whether or not children make this distinction because they understand that biological and psychological processes operate according to fundamentally different causal mechanisms. The results suggest that 5-year-olds do possess this understanding, and furthermore, they have intuitions about the nature of these different mechanisms.

A Bias for the Natural? Children's Beliefs about Traits Acquired through Effort, Bribes, or Medicine.

Three studies compared beliefs about natural and late blooming positive traits with those acquired through personal effort, extrinsic rewards or medicine. Young children (5-6 years), older children (8-13 years), and adults all showed a strong bias for natural and late blooming traits over acquired traits. All age groups, except 8- to 10-year-olds, treated natural and late-blooming traits as fixed essences that would persist over time and under challenging conditions. Older children and adults viewed traits acquired by intrinsic effort as more similar to natural and late-blooming traits than those acquired through bribes or medicine, suggesting that intrinsic effort itself comes to be seen as a more natural mechanism of change. A bias for the natural may therefore be an early emerging way of evaluating others that is reinforced by the ambient culture and becomes stronger with increasing age.

Overoptimism about future knowledge: Early arrogance?

Abstract Three studies explored whether young children (5–7 years) have more optimistic views of their future knowledge than older children (8–12 years) and adults. In Study 1, younger children were more likely than older children and adults to expect greater knowledge in both young and mature protagonists. Both groups of children saw knowledge rising at a faster rate into adulthood than adult participants did. All ages judged moral knowledge as much easier to acquire than other types of knowledge, such as artifacts. In Study 2, all children saw their own future knowledge in especially optimistic terms in comparison to ratings by adults, and the older children exhibited a self-enhancement bias. Study 3 found an overall preference for the acquisition of positively valenced future knowledge, particularly for the 8- to 12-year olds and in the domain of morality, suggesting pragmatic underpinnings for these judgments.

What Could You Really Learn on Your Own?: Understanding the Epistemic Limitations of Knowledge Acquisition.

Three studies explored the abilities of 205 children (5-11 years) and 74 adults (18-72 years) to distinguish directly versus indirectly acquired information in a scenario where an individual grew up in isolation from human culture. Directly acquired information is knowledge acquired through firsthand experience. Indirectly acquired information is knowledge that requires input from others. All children distinguished directly from indirectly acquired knowledge (Studies 1-3), even when the indirectly acquired knowledge was highly familiar (Study 2). All children also distinguished difficult-to-acquire direct knowledge from simple-to-acquire direct knowledge (Study 3). The major developmental change was the increasing ability to completely rule out indirect knowledge as possible for an isolated individual to acquire.

III. TIME COURSES OF ILLNESSES AND TREATMENTS

In Chapter I, we proposed that intuitions about timing are likely to undergo developmental changes during the early school years both with respect to reasoning about treatments for chronic and acute illnesses and also with respect to deviations from prescribed cures. Therefore, to explore children’s developing understanding of time-course relations for causes and cures, we looked at children’s intuitions about different treatment patterns over time as a function of acute versus chronic diseases. In addition, we explored children’s beliefs about why some medications might need to be spaced over time as opposed to being delivered all at once. More subtly, we asked how children come to understand that the link between a particular medicine and symptom alleviationmay not be a simple one-to-onemapping of time courses. In addition, because different topic areas interact, we also wanted toexplore the influencesofdualismandoptimismon timing-related intuitions. By the time they begin school, most children have been exposed either directly or indirectly to both chronic and acute illnesses and their treatments (Compas et al., 2012). Indeed, young children (5–7) might well be able to associate certain familiar diseases (chicken pox, asthma) with different time

II. THE PROPER REALMS OF MEDICINES AND THEIR ALTERNATIVES: WHAT COUNT AS CURES?

As a foundation for what follows in later chapters in this monograph, Chapter II asks how children come to narrow down the most plausible links between diseases and potential cures. Based on the predictions proposed in Chapter I, we expected that both spatial proximity and dualism biases would be present throughout the school years as a relatively constant interpretative backdrop. However, because younger children have less detailed causal mechanistic understandings of diseases and cures, they might be expected to endorse interventions for illnesses that would be regarded as implausible by most adults. This wider endorsement would also follow fromour prediction of an early tendency to be more optimistic about outcomes. Given that the goal of this chapter is to survey a wide range of intuitions about what count as cures, it is useful to first briefly consider the full spectrum of alleged cures that have been endorsed over the years and the ways that prior studies with adults and children might bear on those patterns.Throughout history, healing powers have been attributed to a wide variety of ingested substances ranging from almost every conceivable food, to organic nonfoods such as inedible plants and unusual nonnutritious animals or parts of animals,

When Saying "I'm Best" Is Benign: Developmental Shifts in Perceptions of Boasting.

Four studies explored developmental changes in attitudes toward boasting. Overall, 5- to 7-year-olds (N = 130) were more likely than 8- to 11-year-olds (N = 126) and adults (N = 263) to view characters who boasted about valued traits as likable. In Study 1, younger children, unlike the older participants, liked and morally valued boasters who were accurate about their boasts. Justifications suggested the 5- to 7-year-olds perceived the boaster as sharing knowledge and being potentially helpful. No age group liked boasters who misrepresented themselves. In Study 2, boasters about valued traits were less liked by all ages than those who untruthfully downplayed their own abilities to please others. Adults, however, preferred boasters when the traits were unimportant and easily verifiable. In Study 3, a boaster was contrasted with a humble character, who never spoke about possessing the positively valued trait. Younger children showed a significant preference for the boaster, while older children and adults strongly preferred the humble person. Finally, Study 4 supported the proposal that younger children like boasters because boasters provide information about a capacity to help. Indeed, younger children valued boasters as potential helpers as much as they valued those who explicitly offered to help. Older participants did not differ from chance in their expectations that boasters could help. These age-related shifts in attitudes toward boasting may arise from a convergence of developmental changes in 4 underlying related processes—social sharing, self-presenting, discerning motives, and overoptimism.