Children's Judgments of Possibility Align With Their Judgments of Actuality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Children often say that possible events are impossible, and only gradually come to see these events as possible. For instance, they often deny that people could do unusual things, like own a pet peacock, or immoral things, like stealing or lying. These possibility denials are surprising. For instance, children have first-hand experience with the very moral violations they say are impossible. In two experiments (total N = 220), we provide evidence that children's possibility denials can nonetheless be taken at face value and do not merely arise from quirks in how children understand questions about possibility. We do this by showing that these denials also arise in children's judgments of actuality-their judgments about what has actually happened and about which assertions of actual events could be true. In Experiment 1, children aged 4-7 judged whether ordinary, immoral, and improbable events could happen or had ever happened. With both judgments, children mostly responded affirmatively to ordinary events, often responded negatively for immoral events, and mostly responded negatively to improbable ones. In Experiment 2, children aged 5-7 judged if assertions of the three kinds of events could be true, and the same pattern emerged again. Together, these findings show that children's denials of immoral and conceptually improbable events extend beyond their judgments about what is possible and match their inferences about what is actual. These correspondences across judgments suggest that children drew on a single procedure, or set of procedures, for assessing possibility. SUMMARY: We show that children judge unexpected events as both impossible and nonactual. Four- to seven-year-olds judged if events could happen, if events had ever happened, and if assertions about events could be true. For all judgments, children often responded negatively to immoral events, and mostly responded negatively to conceptually improbable ones. Children's possibility denials can be taken at face value, and do not reflect quirks in how they respond to questions about possibility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".