Nadia Chernyak

A Comparison of American and Nepalese Children's Concepts of Freedom of Choice and Social Constraint

Recent work has shown that preschool-aged children and adults understand freedom of choice regardless of culture, but that adults across cultures differ in perceiving social obligations as constraints on action. To investigate the development of these cultural differences and universalities, we interviewed school-aged children (4-11) in Nepal and the United States regarding beliefs about peoples freedom of choice and constraint to follow preferences, perform impossible acts, and break social obligations. Children across cultures and ages universally endorsed the choice to follow preferences but not to perform impossible acts. Age and culture effects also emerged: Young children in both cultures viewed social obligations as constraints on action, but American children did so less as they aged. These findings suggest that while basic notions of free choice are universal, recognitions of social obligations as constraints on action may be culturally learned.

Giving Preschoolers Choice Increases Sharing Behavior

Young children are remarkably prosocial, but the mechanisms driving their prosociality are not well understood. Here, we propose that the experience of choice is critically tied to the expression of young children’s altruistic behavior. Three- and 4-year-olds were asked to allocate resources to an individual in need by making a costly choice (allocating a resource they could have kept for themselves), a noncostly choice (allocating a resource that would otherwise be thrown away), or no choice (following instructions to allocate the resource). We measured subsequent prosociality by allowing children to then allocate new resources to a new individual. Although the majority of children shared with the first individual, children who were given costly alternatives shared more with the new individual. Results are discussed in terms of a prosocial-construal hypothesis, which suggests that children rationally infer their prosociality through the process of making difficult, autonomous choices.

The Self as a Moral Agent: Preschoolers Behave Morally but Believe in the Freedom to Do Otherwise

Recent work suggests a strong connection between intuitions regarding our own free will and our moral behavior. We investigate the origins of this link by asking whether preschool-aged children construe their own moral actions as freely chosen. We gave children the option to make three moral/social choices (avoiding harm to another, following a rule, and following peer behavior) and then asked them to retrospect as to whether they were free to have done otherwise. When given the choice to act (either morally or immorally), children avoided harm and abided by rules, but they endorsed their freedom to have done otherwise. When choice was restricted by adult instruction, children did not endorse their free choice and indicated feeling constrained by moral obligation in their explanatory responses. These results suggest that children believe that their moral actions afford free will, but this belief is dependent on their experience of choice.

Preschoolers’ Selfish Sharing Is Reduced by Prior Experience With Proportional Generosity

Young children make sophisticated social and normative inferences based on proportional reasoning. We explored the possibility that proportional cues also help children learn from and about their own generosity. Across two experiments, 3- to 4-year-olds had the opportunity to give either 1 of 4, 1 of 3, 1 of 2, or 1 of 1 of their resources to an individual in need. We then measured children’s subsequent prosociality by looking at sharing behavior with a new individual. The more proportionally generous the initial action, the less likely children were to share selfishly in the second phase. Our results suggest that children make sense of their own actions using proportional cues and that giving children experience with difficult, prosocial actions increases the likelihood of their recurrence.

Training Preschoolers' Prospective Abilities through Conversation about the Extended Self.

The ability to act on behalf of one’s future self is related to uniquely human abilities such as planning, delay of gratification, and goal attainment. Although prospection develops rapidly during early childhood, little is known about the mechanisms that support its development. Here we explored whether encouraging children to talk about their extended selves (self outside the present context) boosts their prospective abilities. Preschoolers (N = 81) participated in a 5-min interaction with an adult in which they were asked to talk about events in the near future, distant future, near past, or present. Compared with children discussing their present and distant future, children asked to discuss events in their near future or near past displayed better planning and prospective memory. Additionally, those 2 conditions were most effective in eliciting self-projection (use of personal pronouns). Results suggest that experience communicating about the temporally contiguous, extended self may promote children’s future-oriented thinking.

Preschoolers’ Compliance With Others’ Violations of Fairness Norms: The Roles of Intentionality and Affective Perspective Taking

ABSTRACT Young children are remarkably compliant with social norms, especially those governing fairness and equality. Yet children also frequently observe and face opportunities to violate those social norms, particularly in situations in which doing so is self-beneficial. In 3 studies, we investigated the conditions under which children adhere to social norms using a novel resource distribution paradigm in which children met an experimenter who expressed either a norm-consistent (equal distribution) or norm-inconsistent (unequal distribution) intention. In Experiment 1, we found that preschoolers generally complied with an experimenter’s intention, regardless of its norm consistency. In Experiment 2, the experimenter again expressed a norm-consistent or norm-inconsistent intention but accidentally placed resources in the opposite distribution of that intended. Preschoolers mostly defaulted to the social norm of fairness. However, they were less likely to do so (and more likely to comply with the norm-violating experimenter) when the inequality was self-benefitting. The likelihood of norm defiance in the face of self-benefit appeared to relate to children’s affective perspective taking. In Experiment 3, we found that training preschoolers in affective perspective taking increased the likelihood children would defy a norm-violating experimenter’s unfair intention. Thus, although preschoolers were generally compliant, both fairness norms and affective perspective taking served as important mechanisms to help children selectively defy adults’ instructions and intentions.