Knowing the limits of one's understanding: the development of an awareness of an illusion of explanatory depth

Adults overestimate the detail and depth of their explanatory knowledge, but through providing explanations they recognize their initial illusion of understanding. By contrast, they are much more accurate in making self-assessments for other kinds of knowledge, such as for procedures, narratives, and facts. Two studies examined this illusion of explanatory depth with 48 children each in grades K, 2, and 4, and also explored adults' ratings of the children's explanations. Children judged their understanding of mechanical devices (Study 1) and procedures (Study 2). Second and fourth graders showed a clear illusion of explanatory depth for devices, recognizing the inaccuracy of their initial impressions after providing explanations. The illusion did not occur for knowledge of procedures.     

Exploring ownership in a developmental context

Ownership and economic behaviors are highly salient elements of the human social landscape. Indeed, the human world is literally constructed of property. Individuals perceive and manipulate a complex web of people and property that is largely invisible and abstract. In this chapter, the authors focus on drawing together information from a variety of disciplines, including legal theory, philosophy, psychology, and economics, to begin creating a coherent picture of the cognitive architecture that underlies ownership concepts. In doing so, the authors review theories of ownership and discuss recent research that highlights the unique contributions garnered by studying ownership in a developmental context.     

Choosing between hearts and minds: Children's understanding of moral advisors

Moral development research has often focused on the development of moral reasoning without considering children's understanding of moral advisors. We investigated how children construe sources of moral advice by examining the characteristics that children deem necessary for reasoning about moral or scientific problems. In two experiments, children in grades K, 2, and 4 were presented with dilemmas of a moral nature or scientific nature and chose between two advisors. Second and fourth graders chose advisors differentially based on their expertise, while kindergartners did not discriminate between advisors. In a third experiment, older children indicated that only certain characteristics are needed to solve moral or scientific problems, and they endorsed these characteristics differentially based on the problem to be solved. Thus, by middle childhood, children construe moral knowledge as distinct from scientific knowledge and select advisors in each area accordingly.     

Development of the ability to perceive ambiguities: Evidence for the task specificity of a linguistic skill

This study asked whether children's ability to perceive linguistic ambiguities was correlated with that of perceiving pictorial ambiguities. A total of 48 ambiguous sentences and 24 ambiguous pictures were selected for comprehensibility. Half the sentences and pictures were symbolic ambiguities (i.e., they contained symbols that stood for two different objects) and half were structural ambiguities (i.e., the structures of the sentences or pictures could be broken up two different ways). No significant correlations were found between the linguistic and pictorial modes. In both modes, correct performance on the symbolic ambiguities was better and was observed earlier than that for structural ambiguities. After taking into account certain methodological problems with nonsignificant correlations and ambiguous sentences, it was concluded that at least some nontrivial component of the linguistic ambiguity detector was task specific to language.     

The development of cynicism

Two experiments explored the development of cynicism by examining how children evaluate other people who make claims consistent or inconsistent with their self-interests. In Experiment 1, kindergartners, second graders, and fourth graders heard stories with ambiguous conclusions in which characters made statements that were aligned either with or against self-interest. Older children took into account the self-interests of characters in determining how much to believe them: They discounted statements aligned with self-interest, whereas they accepted statements going against self-interest. Experiment 2 examined children's endorsement of three different explanations for potentially self-interested statements: lies, biases, and mistakes. Like adults, sixth graders endorsed lies and bias as plausible explanations for wrong statements aligned with self-interest; younger children did not endorse bias. Implications for the development of cynicism and children's understanding of bias are discussed.     

Gender Ideology and Motherhood: The Consequences of Race on Earnings

Using a nationally representative US sample, this study explores the relationship between gender ideology and the earnings of African American and white mothers over a 10-year period (1988–1998). We further investigate how factors related to fertility (i.e., age at first birth and the number of children) impact earnings for these mothers. Findings show, that regardless of race, a conservative gender ideology reduces women’s earnings but less so for African Americans compared to whites. With regard to fertility, the number of children is detrimental to the earnings of white mothers, but has no effect on the African American mothers in our sample. However, early childbearing does depress the earnings of African American women more so than for their white counterparts.