Why wearing a yellow hat is impossible : Chinese and U.S. Children’s developing possibility conceptions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When thinking about possibility, one can consider epistemic or deontic principles (i.e., physical possibility or permissibility). Cultures differing in independence and interdependence weigh epistemic and deontic obligations differently; children in these cultures may conceive of possibility differently. A growing body of research on children’s possibility conceptions has consistently replicated a robust finding: though children as young as 4 recognize events that violate physical laws as impossible, these children also deny the possibility of events that are physically possible nevertheless improbable. From ages 4-8, children increasingly acknowledge the possibility of these events (e.g., Shtulman & Carey, 2007). However, these replications have occurred within the U.S. and Canada. The current dissertation takes this research to China, asking whether this pattern holds in an independent culture, and explores potential cultural influences on possibility judgments of ordinary events (i.e., physical regularities), impossible events (i.e., physical violations), and improbable events (i.e., physical irregularities). Study 1 explores the effect of consensus testimony on 8-year-olds possibility judgments in Austin, TX and Wuhan, China. Study 2 explores the developmental trajectory of children’s possibility judgments in Austin and Wuhan, and Study 3 asks whether children from Austin and five different Chinese cities use epistemic constraints to make possibility judgments. This research suggests that culture influences not only what children judge to be possible, but also how children reason about possibility. These findings underscore the complex exchange between culture and cognitive development and reinforce the need for more cross-cultural research with varied populations in diverse locations when studying conceptual development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".