Children's Understanding of Possibility

• In Event: Poster Session 03
  In Poster Session: PS 03 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Exploring unconventional ideas and new possibilities is key to making progress as human beings. Leading theories suggest that children might be our best hope for this kind of exploration—as Alison Gopnik puts it, “children are the R&D division of humanity” (Gopnik, 1998). This idea predicts that children should be more open to exploration and possibility than adults. However, research to date on children’s judgments of what is possible suggests that children are, instead, remarkably closed to possibility, and judge even implausible events like drinking onion juice to be impossible (e.g., Shtulman & Carey, 2007).
One way of reconciling these ideas is to suggest that children are more open to possibility than previous research has captured. Here, we suggest that this is due to the forced dichotomy that has been created between “impossible” and “possible”. It may be that when adults judge something to be improbable, they categorize it with “possible”, whereas when children judge something to be improbable, they categorize it with “impossible”. But in both cases, adults and children might ultimately be making the same underlying judgment: this event is really improbable.
In this study, we investigate whether providing children with the option of judging events “improbable” rather than only “possible” or “impossible” allows them to express an adult-like understanding of possibility. In addition, we examine an as-yet unexplored factor relevant to possibility: whether the event is set in the past or the future.
Children (5-8 years) were told about 9 events: 3 possible, 3 impossible and 3 improbable, and asked whether in the past they were: “Possible and could definitely happen”, “Impossible and could never ever happen”, or improbable “It could maybe happen once but probably won’t”. They then answered the same questions about whether 9 different events could happen in the future.
We predict that, unlike in previous studies, children will respond differently to the improbable and impossible items, such that a greater number of children will judge impossible items to be impossible than the number who judge improbable items to be impossible. We also expect a main effect of time period, such that overall, events will be judged more possible in the future than in the past. Finally, we think a main effect of age group is likely, such that older children will be more likely to judge events as possible.
Each age group’s possibility judgments for past and future events will be analysed using a repeated measures ANOVA. In addition, we will examine the percentage of children who classified each event as possible, improbable, and impossible using non-parametric statistics (Friedman test and McNemar test). We have pre-registered these hypotheses and analysis plans on AsPredicted.org, and we have currently collected data from 55 of 80 participants, and will easily complete data collection and analysis before the meeting.
If these predictions hold, this will support the idea that children have a more nuanced and adult-like understanding of possibility, which might help them “think outside the box” to explore the improbable, while avoiding the truly impossible.

Authors

• Umang Khan, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author

• Christina Starmans, University of Toronto
  Non-Presenting Author