Children's beliefs about causes of human characteristics: Genes, environment, or choice?
| Autor: | Toby Epstein Jayaratne, Meredith Meyer, Steven O. Roberts, Susan A. Gelman |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2020 |
| Předmět: |
Adult
Male Adolescent Human Characteristics Experimental and Cognitive Psychology PsycINFO Social Environment Choice Behavior 050105 experimental psychology Article Developmental psychology Young Adult Developmental Neuroscience Humans 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Early childhood Set (psychology) Child General Psychology Social perception 05 social sciences Social environment Middle Aged Comprehension Social Perception Female Psychology Attribution Mechanism (sociology) |
| Zdroj: | J Exp Psychol Gen |
| ISSN: | 1939-2222 |
| Popis: | To what extent do our genes make us nice, smart, or athletic? The explanatory frameworks we employ have broad consequences for how we evaluate and interact with others. Yet to date, little is known regarding when and how young children appeal to genetic explanations to understand human difference. The current study examined children's (aged 7-13 years) and adults' explanations for a set of human characteristics, contrasting genetic attributions with environmental and choice-based attributions. Whereas most adults and older children offered an unprompted genetic explanation at least once on an open-ended task, such explanations were not seen from younger children. However, even younger children, once trained on the mechanism of genes, endorsed genetic explanations for a range of characteristics-often in combination with environment and choice. Moreover, only adults favored genetic explanations for intelligence and athleticism; children, in contrast, favored environment and choice explanations for these characteristics. These findings suggest that children can employ genetic explanations in principled ways as early as 7 years of age but also that such explanations are used to account for a wider range of features by adults. Our study provides some of the first evidence regarding the ways in which genetic attributions emerge and change starting in early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved). |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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