Developing Notions of Free Will: Preschoolers' Understanding of How Intangible Constraints Bind Their Freedom of Choice

Abstract

Developing Notions of Free Will: Preschoolers’ Understanding of How Intangible Constraints Bind Their Freedom of Choice Nadia Chernyak (nc98@cornell.edu), Tamar Kushnir (tk397@cornell.edu) Department of Human Development, Martha Van Rensselaer Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 USA Henry Wellman (hmw@umich.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Michigan 530 Church Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA Abstract Our folk psychology involves the ability to reason about free will. In a series of experiments, we looked at young children’s ability to reason about their own freedom of choice, and contrast this with their ability to reason about situations that constrain it. We asked preschoolers (Range: 4 y; 1 mo. – 5 y; 7 mo.) whether they had the choice to have done otherwise when they did not have the necessary knowledge to do so (epistemic constraint), had the moral duty not to do so (moral constraint), preferred not to do so (preference constraint), were told not to do so (permissive constraint), or were told that everyone else did not do so (conformist constraint). Results suggest that while preschool children generally believe their actions are freely chosen, they also understand how psychological, social and moral considerations may constrain their actions. These results have implications for children’s developing notions of free will and moral reasoning. Keywords: preschoolers, freedom of choice, morality, epistemic states Introduction Free will has long been studied in the field of philosophy, social psychology, and more recently, cognitive neuroscience (Baer, Kaufman, & Baumeister, 2008; Kane, 2002; Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008; Wegner, 2003). Recent work has also begun to investigate how this important intuition develops and takes form in young children’s reasoning (Kushnir, Wellman, & Chernyak, 2009; Nichols, 2004; Seiver, Kushnir, & Gopnik, 2009). For example, Nichols (2004) found that six-year-old children ascribe the choice to have done otherwise to an agent, but not an inanimate object. Therefore, Nichols (2004) posits an agent-causal view of free will in which children believe that agents have indeterminate choice which is unbound by outside forces. This is contrasted with children’s beliefs about physical causation, namely that, unlike agents, inanimate objects are not free to choose their own course of action and are wholly governed by outside forces. However, the distinction between agents and inanimate objects is only part of our adult intuitions about freedom of choice. More central to our mature understanding – and to the important role that intuitive notions of free will play in our social and moral reasoning – is the ability to contrast situations in which agents are free to choose and situations in which agents are constrained in their choices. In other words, to adults, “free will can’t really mean that at any moment a person’s behavior is totally unpredictable (and therefore entirely unconstrained)” (p.4; Baer et al., 2008). Therefore, understanding free will implies understanding the complementary notion of constraint. Kushnir et al. (2009) asked four- and five-year old children if they could have done otherwise in two situations. One in which they were free to draw a picture and one in which they were physically prevented from doing so (i.e., the experimenter held the child’s hand so that it was stuck in one place). Children overwhelmingly responded that they had freedom of choice when they were physically unbounded, but responded that they did not have that freedom when they were physically constrained. Therefore, preschoolers may already know that their agency, and therefore their freedom of choice, is limited by the physical world. However, the physical world is just one type of force that may constrain one’s free will. One’s freedom to choose may also be constrained, or at least limited, by non-physical phenomena, such as beliefs, knowledge states, desires, and social and moral obligations. Research on children’s social cognition shows that preschoolers have a rather firm grasp of how constraints which come from the mind differ from those of the physical world (Inagaki & Hatano, 1999, Wellman, 1990). In the current investigation, we explore two related questions about such “intangible” constraints: First, do young children understand that these constraints bind their freedom of choice? Or alternatively, do they believe that their ability to have done otherwise is unbounded by psychological and social forces, and is subject only to the laws of the physical world? Second, can children distinguish between intangible constraints which fully determine behavior (and thus fully constrain free will) and those which only influence it (and thus do not fully constrain free will)? Experiments 1 and 2 explored the first question by asking older and younger preschool children whether they believed they had the choice to do otherwise when they didn’t have the necessary knowledge to do so. We chose this epistemic constraint – that seeing leads to knowing – because it is one