The Role of Causality and Similarity in Children’s Possibility Judgments: A Training Study

• In Event: How Children Judge the Possibility of Improbable and Impossible Events

Abstract

Many cognitive activities, from planning future actions to evaluating others’ testimony, requires thinking about possibility (Phillips & Knobe, 2018). At least two kinds of considerations are relevant to this task: causal mechanisms and empirical precedents (Goulding et al., 2022). Causal mechanisms can be used to model the event under consideration, whereas empirical precedents can be used to decide how similar it is to events that have actually occurred. Consider the event of owning an alligator for a pet. This event could be affirmed as possible by identifying a causal process leading to it, such as a person finding a baby alligator in a swamp and then raising it in the backyard, or by identifying a known event sufficiently similar to the target event, such as that people own pythons as pets and pythons are similar to alligators.

Improbable events, like owning a pet alligator, are notoriously difficult for young children to affirm as possible (Shtulman & Carey, 2007). Children tend to deny the possibility of any event that violates their expectations, even if those expectations do not align with physical laws. In the current study, we investigated the source of children’s reluctance to judge improbable events possible by teaching them strategies for assessing possibility, either a causality-based strategy or a similarity-based strategy, as described above.

The participants were 76 children between the ages of four and twelve. They were asked about the possibility of three categories of events: pets, ice cream, and houses. Within each category, children judged the possibility of two ordinary events, two impossible events, and three improbable events. Sample events are listed in Table 1. After this pretest, children received training on how to judge possibility by identifying causal mechanisms that would allow the event to occur or by identifying known events similar to the target event. The training provided examples of improbable pets and improbable ice cream flavors but did not provide examples of improbable houses. At posttest, children made possibility judgments for a new events of each type in each category.

Children’s possibility judgments were scored on a scale from 0 to 2, where 2 corresponded to “possible,” 1 to “kinda impossible,” and 0 to “very impossible.” On average, children judged the ordinary events possible (M = 1.9) and judged the impossible events “very impossible” (M = 0.3) but judged the improbable events “kinda impossible” (M = 1.1). Their judgments for improbable events are displayed in Figure 1. Children were more likely to judge improbable events possible following training, and this change was consistent across the two types of training and across children of different ages. It was not consistent across event categories, however. Children improved their possibility judgments in the categories mentioned in the training but not the third, unmentioned category (houses). These findings indicate that children can make use of both causality and similarity when assessing the possibility of extraordinary events, but their ability to do so is highly constrained, underscoring the robustness of their propensity to deny the possibility of improbable events.

Author

• Andrew E Shtulman, Occidental College
  Presenting Author