The development of German and Indian children’s ecological reasoning

• In Event: The development of speciesism: Children’s and adolescents’ moral cognition regarding animals and the natural world

Abstract

With the climate emergency and loss of biodiversity becoming ever more pressing, it is crucial to understand how our relation with the natural world develops in different communities worldwide. Previous research has shown variation in children’s reasoning about ecological relations, with exposure to the natural world and educational practices playing an important role (e.g., Bang et al., 2007; Medin et al., 2010). This work has often focused on comparing children from indigenous communities with European American children (e.g., Unsworth et al., 2012), however, we still know little about how developmental trajectories of children growing up in urban environments in the Global North and South compare. This is an important oversight as currently more than 50% of the world’s population live in cities with 7 out of 10 people projected to live in cities by 2015 (Worldbank, 2020). We conducted a study with 7- to 13-year-old children in India (N = 90, M = 9.52 years) and Germany (N = 84, M=9.4 years) to gain insight into how children group animals, humans, plants, natural objects, and artefacts and how they justify these groupings. We implemented an online card-sorting task (inspired by Busch, Watson-Jones, & Legare, 2018; Levin & Unsworth, 2013) with 17 cards depicting a human figure, and different animals, plants, artefacts and natural kinds. After a short warm-up to ensure participants understood the task, we asked children to sort the cards into as many groups as they liked. Once finished, we asked them to justify their groupings. We recorded where they grouped the human (e.g. other animals), and coded their justifications. Both German and Indian children were more likely to group the human with other animals with increasing age (B = 0.44, z = 2.73, p = .006), with no effect of location (B = 0.10, z = 0.32, p = .747). Interestingly, we found an interaction between location and age for grouping the human with plants (B = -0.96, z = -2.10, p = .036), with Indian children grouping humans and plants together from an early age, but only older German children doing so. We fitted generalized linear mixed models to analyse children’s justifications and found that a model with a three-way-interaction of location*age*justification best fit the data (χ2 = 604.24, p < .001). Plots of predicted frequencies per location across ages, revealed that use of taxonomic reasons slightly decreased with age in both locations. Use of ecological reasons decline with age in German children but remained level for Indian children. Moreover, utility reasons increased with age in India, but decreased with age in Germany. Our results show that children in different urban locations across the world increasingly view humans as part of the animal kingdom likely due to educational practices (e.g., Busch et al., 2018; Levin & Unsworth, 2013). However, our findings also revealed some subtle differences in what reasons children preferred to give for their categorizations.

Author

• Katja Liebal
  Presenting Author