Children’s Developing Intuitions of the Controllability of Beliefs

• In Event: Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Topic - Cognitive Processes

Abstract

Beliefs play a critical role in our lives and in society. Recently, people discussing their beliefs regarding the danger of a virus often leads to hostile conflicts and arguments. One reason is that beliefs have life-changing consequences. But are we responsible for our beliefs? Although it seems we voluntarily decide to engage in certain actions, can we also voluntarily decide to hold certain beliefs? In other words, do we have a choice in our beliefs, or are we forced to possess the beliefs we hold?

Despite disagreement over whether beliefs are voluntary in the philosophical literature (Hieronymi, 2006; Ganapini, 2020), recent psychological work indicates that adults endorse the ability to control one’s mental states, especially beliefs (Cusimano & Goodwin, 2019). However, much is still unknown about how we perceive the controllability of beliefs, especially in young children. This is a crucial topic to study given how often we blame others for their beliefs and the combativeness in discourse that follows. While research has investigated children’s judgments of the controllability of actions (Kushnir et al., 2015), very little is understood about their judgments of the controllability of beliefs. Additionally, in Cusimano & Goodwin (2019), adult’s judge beliefs that are conceptualized very broadly, without testing how different kinds of beliefs influence the degree to which they are viewed as controllable.

In the current pre-registered and ongoing study, we investigate if 5-6- and 7-8-year old children and adults differ in how they judge the controllability of others' beliefs. Moreover, we examine how perceptions of controllability depend on the evidence provided for a belief. In a within-subjects design, participants view picture book stories that describe a character and a belief they hold. The character’s belief is either based on no evidence (e.g., believing it is sunny outside while being in a room with no windows), strong supporting evidence (e.g., believing it is sunny outside after going into a room with windows), or strong counterevidence (e.g., believing it is cloudy outside despite it being sunny). Participants are then asked whether the character could believe otherwise. Additionally, we examine judgments of the controllability of actions as reference conditions. These stories consist of a character’s possible action (e.g., grabbing one of two cups) or impossible action (e.g., flying into the sky). We expect that beliefs supported by no evidence or contradicted by evidence will be viewed as controllable (similar to possible actions), while beliefs supported by strong evidence will be viewed as uncontrollable (similar to impossible actions).

The data collection for this study is ongoing. Following a simulation-based power analysis, we will collect data from 120 participants (40 participants per age group). As of the submission date, data from 18/120 participants has been collected online over Zoom. Our goal is to finish data collection for children and adults by the end of November 2020. For our analysis, we will use logistic GLMMs, following the same analysis which has been used in the simulation.

Link to pre-registration: https://aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=pi26ed

Authors

• Joshua Allan Confer, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author

• Hanna Schleihauf, Utrecht University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jan Engelmann, University of California - Berkeley
  Non-Presenting Author