Discounting in preschoolers: effect of type of reward agent

I. INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING MEDICINES AND MEDICAL INTERVENTIONS

We live in an increasingly pharmacological and medical world, where children and adults frequently encounter alleged treatments for an enormous range of illnesses. How do we come to understand what heals and why? Here, 15 studies explore how 1,414 children (ages 5-11) and 882 adults construe the efficacies of different kinds of cures. Developmental patterns in folk physics, psychology, and biology lead to predictions about which expectations about cures will remain relatively constant across development and which will change. With respect to stability, we find that even young school children (ages 5-7) distinguish between physical and psychological disorders and the treatments most effective for each. In contrast, young children reason differently about temporal properties associated with cures. They often judge that dramatic departures from prescribed schedules will continue to be effective. Young children are also less likely than older ages to differentiate between the treatment needs of acute versus chronic disorders. Young children see medicines as agent-like entities that migrate only to afflicted regions while having "cure-all" properties, views that help explain their difficulties grasping side effects. They also differ from older children and adults by judging pain and effort as reducing, instead of enhancing, a treatment's power. Finally, across all studies, optimism about treatment efficacy declines with age. Taken together, these studies show major developmental changes in how children envision the ways medicines work in the body. Moreover, these findings link to broader patterns in cognitive development and have implications for how medicines should be explained to children.

Children's Evaluation of Other People's Self-Descriptions

Children's evaluations of what people communicate about themselves were examined in three studies with a total of 296 participants (aged four to 12). Participants heard scenarios in which characters' motivations to reveal truthful information were systematically manipulated to examine (1) children's understanding that people do not always reveal true information, and (2) children's use of contextual cues to judge the credibility of what individuals say about themselves. Results from Study 1 suggest that elementary school children are quite sophisticated at reasoning with reference to motive information. Study 2 suggests that preschool children can also make use of motive information that is salient and familiar. For example, even preschool children responded that boys are less likely than girls to reveal to peers that they like to play with dolls. Study 3 suggests that children's reasoning about self-presentation is linked to their beliefs about social acceptability norms.

Social perspective taking and use of discounting in children's perceptions of others' helping behavior

The authors investigated the relationship between children's ability to take the social perspective of another and their use of the causal attribution principle known as discounting in assessing others' kindness in helping. The participants (N = 153), 7 to 16 years old, were interviewed in a township bordering Johannesburg. Each participant was administered 2 perspective-taking tasks and a series of vignettes, based on prosocial versus self-interested motives, assessing perceptions of kindness in helping. A significant relationship was established at p < .01 between social perspective-taking ability and use of discounting, such that participants at higher perspective-taking levels judged helpful behavior as significantly less kind than did their peers when the behavior was motivated by self-interest. This finding is interpreted in terms of literature suggesting that advances in perspective taking facilitate the recognition of the manipulative function of externally offered incentives. Observations are made regarding the cross-cultural investigation of these variables.