Abstract
What is the relation between humans and non-human animals? From a biological perspective, we view humans as one species among many, but in the fables and films we create for children, we often offer an anthropocentric perspective, imbuing non-human animals with human-like characteristics. What are the consequences of these distinctly different perspectives on children’s reasoning about the natural world? Some have argued that children universally begin with an anthropocentric perspective and that acquiring a biological perspective requires a basic conceptual change (cf. Carey, 1985). But recent work reveals that this anthropocentric perspective, evidenced in urban 5-year-olds, is not evident in 3-year-olds (Herrmann etal., 2010). This indicates that the anthropocentric perspective is not an obligatory first step in children’s reasoning about biological phenomena. In the current paper, we introduced a priming manipulation to assess whether 5-year-olds’ reasoning about a novel biological property is influenced by the perspectives they encounter in children’s books. Just before participating in a reasoning task, each child read a book about bears with an experimenter. What varied was whether bears were depicted from an anthropomorphic (Berenstain Bears) or biological perspective (Animal Encyclopedia). The priming had a dramatic effect. Children reading the Berenstain Bears showed the standard anthropocentric reasoning pattern, but those reading the Animal Encyclopedia adopted a biological pattern. This offers evidence that urban 5-year-olds can adopt either a biological or a human-centered stance, depending upon the context. Thus, children’s books and other media are double-edged swords. Media may (inadvertently) support human-centered reasoning in young children, but may also be instrumental in redirecting children’s attention to a biological model.
Highlights
Infants and young children greet the creatures of the natural world with special delight
Our goal is (a) to summarize evidence documenting how the relations between human and non-human animals are portrayed in children’s books, (b) to summarize recent research documenting how young children from diverse cultures reason about the relation between human and non-human animals, and (c) to present new experimental evidence documenting how the books that we read to children influence the ways in which they reason about animals
Children who were primed with a book portraying bears anthropomorphically adopted a human-centered reasoning pattern and were less likely to extend the novel property from one non-human animal to others. These results provide unambiguous evidence that the anthropocentric pattern of reasoning typically observed in urban 5-year-old children on the category-based induction task is not the only perspective available to them in reasoning about the biological world. The perspective they adopt is influenced by the way in which non-human animals are represented in a children’s book they read moments earlier
Summary
Infants and young children greet the creatures of the natural world with special delight. Her first books included Goodnight Moon (whose main character is, after all, a little mouse) Years later, her favorite books included Stellaluna (a “switched at birth” story whose main character, a baby bat, finds herself living amongst a family of birds, all of whom talk – in English – about food preferences, emotions, and a sense of belonging). Her favorite books included Stellaluna (a “switched at birth” story whose main character, a baby bat, finds herself living amongst a family of birds, all of whom talk – in English – about food preferences, emotions, and a sense of belonging) Perhaps not surprisingly, this little child who so loved animals announced that she was going to be a veterinarian when she grew up
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