Improbable or Impossible? How Children Reason About the Possibility of Extraordinary Events

• Main Authors: Andrew Shtulman, Susan Carey
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.71.3911; http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/Shtulman_Carey-Improbable_or_impossible-ChildDev2007.pdf

The present study investigated the development of possibility-judgment strategies between the ages of 4 and 8. In Experiment 1, 48 children and 16 adults were asked whether a variety of extraordinary events could or could not occur in real life. Although children of all ages denied the possibility of events that adults also judged impossible, children frequently denied the possibility of events that adults judged improbable but not impossible. Three additional experiments varied the manner in which possibility judgments were elicited and confirmed the robustness of preschoolers ’ tendency to judge improbable events impossible. Overall, it is argued that children initially mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur for evidence that no such circumstances exist. One of the traits that differentiates human beings from other animals is our ability to learn about entities and events that we have not personally observed. From the testimony of other individuals, we regularly learn about people we have never met (e.g., Beethoven, Rembrandt, Einstein), places we have never been (e.g., Pompeii, Antarctica, Mars), and objects we have never seen (e.g., genes, electrons, radio waves). We can even conceive of entities and events that no one has ever observed (e.g., antigravity machines, time travel, human cloning). Of course, not everything that is conceivable is possible. The ability to differentiate possible things from impossible things is therefore an invaluable skill when reasoning about the unobserved and the unobservable. The development of such an ability is of interest to cognitive psychologists for at least two reasons. First, much of the knowledge we acquire in childhood is learned from the testimony of other individuals, and the extent to which children are able to differentiate possible events from impossible events may determine the extent to which they are able to differentiate fact from fiction, truth from falsehood. Second, many researchers have likened conceptual ...