The Peter Pan effect: Why children believe their preferences won’t change as they age

• In Event: Children’s Construction of the Self Across Contexts, People, and Time

Abstract

Children are small and relatively weak; they usually hate coffee and find kissing gross. This is all likely to change—but do they know this? How do children think about the types of physical and psychological changes that occur as people grow older? We explored this question in four studies testing 560 4-to-7-year-old children.

In Experiment 1, children were assigned to either a first-person or third-person condition. Children in the first-person condition answered 12 questions about their current physical (e.g., height) and psychological (e.g., liking coffee) characteristics, and then answered the same questions about how they expected to be as a grown-up. In the third-person condition, children answered these questions about another child. Experiment 2 followed the same procedure, but asked about a point further in the future when the child would be “an old person”, to ensure that physical changes were not perceived more positively than psychological changes.

In both studies, children in the first-person condition were more likely to predict that they would change physically than psychologically. However, children in the third-person condition made similar predictions about physical and psychological change (see Figure 1). This suggests that children understand that other children change as they grow up, but they are specifically resistant to predicting psychological change in themselves.

Experiment 3 found that children’s perceptions of controllability helped explain the asymmetry between physical and psychological change. For each of the changes in Experiment 1, children were asked whether people had to change in that way, or if they could decide not to. In both the first-person and third-person conditions, children overwhelmingly judged that physical changes could not be avoided, but psychological changes could.

Given this, why do children resist the idea that their own—but not others’—psychological traits will change? Experiment 4 explored the theory that the salience of our own strong preferences makes them seem immutable. If you really hate coffee, it's hard to imagine ever liking it. If so, then children should be more open to weak preferences changing. For each of twelve psychological traits, children were asked the strength of their current preference, whether it would change when they grew up, and the predicted strength of their adult preference (or equivalent questions about a third party). As predicted, when children thought about change in themselves—but not others—the strength of their current preferences inversely correlated with their predictions that they would change (see Figure 2).

Even children, then, are stymied by a feature of the human imagination—it’s hard to imagine having a psychological preference that clashes with a strong preference one already has. In ongoing research, we find the same effect in adults—for instance, adults are reasonably comfortable accepting that others of their age will grow conservative over time, but (like children denying that they will ever come to like coffee) they think that they themselves will remain true to their views. We are all Peter Pans, believing that we’ll never grow up (at least for psychological traits, that is).

Author

• Christina Starmans, University of Toronto
  Presenting Author