For decades, the consensus among psychologists was that young children adopt an "anthropocentric" stance, favoring humans over non-human animals, when they begin reasoning about the biological world.
But a new study published in Cognitive Development reveals that this style of human-centered reasoning is not universal.
The study included children growing up in an urban setting (Chicago) as well as children from rural Wisconsin, who have more extensive direct contact with the natural world. To examine the influence of culture, the rural community included European-American and Native American (Menominee) children.
The results were striking -- while young urban children revealed a human-centered pattern of reasoning, the rural European-American and Native American children did not. Children's experience, including the extent of their day-to-day interactions with the natural world and their sensitivity to the belief systems of their communities, influences their reasoning about the natural world.
For example, the researchers noted that while children generally are taught in school that only plants and animals are alive, the traditional Menominee notion of "alive" includes natural inanimates, such as rocks and water, and may even include artifacts, depending on the purpose for which they were made.
Such cultural differences provide strong evidence that the human-centered pattern displayed by young urban children is not a universal starting point for development, as researchers and educators had previously assumed, said Sandra Waxman, psychologist at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
"Instead, this human-centered style of reasoning is itself culturally inflected," said Waxman. "It may, in fact, reflect a cultural model that is prevalent in the media for young children, for example, stories and films in which animals talk, sing and act like humans."
Citation:Medin et al., 'Human-centeredness is not a universal feature of young children's reasoning: Culture and experience matter when reasoning about biological entities', Cognitive Development, 2010; doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2010.02.001
