A Comparison of Nepalese and American Children's Concepts of Free Will

A Comparison of Nepalese and American Children’s Concepts of Free Will Nadia Chernyak (nc98@cornell.edu), Tamar Kushnir (tk397@cornell.edu), Katherine M. Sullivan (kms278@cornell.edu), & Qi Wang (qw33@cornell.edu) Department of Human Development, Martha Van Rensselaer Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 USA recent study which examined adult intuitions of free will across cultures found that the basic belief in free will is not culture-dependent (Sarkissian, Chatterjee, De Brigard, Knobe, Nichols, & Sirker, in press). Further evidence of the universality of free will intuitions comes from studies linking the “illusion of conscious will” to our ordinary physical experience of agency (Haggard & Tsakiris, 2009; Wegner, 2002). These two different types of evidence point to the fact that the experience of, and belief in, free will may be universal. Thus, to the extent that children share adult intuitions, children across cultures should articulate similar universal beliefs. However, because issues of caste, traditional gender values, and a strong sense of familial and moral obligations, it is possible that a strong belief in constraint, rather than free will, is deeply infused into Eastern thinking even from a young age. Some work in cross-cultural psychology suggests that individualistic and collectivist cultures differ in their construal of choice, a concept closely related to free will. For example, Americans, unlike their East-Asian counterparts, are more prone to construing mundane, everyday actions such as selecting a pen to write with as a unique choice (Savani, Markus, Naidu, Kumar, & Berlia, 2010), to construing interpersonal obligations as choices (Miller, Bersoff, & Harwood, R. L., 1990), and to attributing others’ behavior as intentionally chosen rather than situationally constrained (Morris & Peng, 1994). Given both shared human experiences and cultural diversity in beliefs, we propose a universal existence of free will that manifests in nuanced versions across cultures. In this work, we compared children ranging from four to eleven years of age across two cultures: the United States and Nepal. Because of strong family, moral, and social obligations stressed in Nepalese culture, this group of children may be particularly susceptible to “constrained” free will. We included this wide age range because past developmental research has shown that cultural differences often increase with time (Miller, 1984; Wang 2004). In this study, we surveyed children in both cultures about a variety of intuitions regarding free will and constraint. In particular, we looked at children’s beliefs about whether they have free will to perform (1) simple, unconstrained actions (e.g., drinking milk instead of juice), (2) physically and mentally constrained actions (e.g., floating in the air instead of falling after a jump, doing something you don’t know how to do), and (3) socially constrained actions (e.g., causing harm to another person, breaking the rules). We predicted three main hypotheses: Abstract Recent work finds that children as young as four years old have an intuitive belief in free will. To what extent is this early-developing intuition universal, and to what extent culturally situated? We surveyed school-aged children (4-11) in two countries (Nepal and the United States) about their beliefs about people’s “free will” to follow personal preferences; break physical and mental constraints; and break social constraints. Results showed both universal and culturally-learned beliefs in free will. Children across cultures shared the early-developing intuitions of free will and constraint, though American children were more likely construe actions as choices. While American children were more likely to believe in the free will to break social constraints as they aged, Nepali children showed the opposite pattern. These findings show that while a basic notion of free will is present and early-developing across both cultures, construals of choice are also culturally learned over time. Keywords: free will, social psychology, development cognition, cross-cultural Introduction Our folk psychology involves the ability to reason about freedom of choice. Recent work in both social and developmental psychology finds that the belief that we are free to do otherwise (i.e., make a choice to take a different course of action) is intuitive (see Baer, Kaufman, & Baumeister, 2008) and early-developing (Chernyak, Kushnir, & Wellman, 2010; Kushnir, Wellman, & Chernyak, 2009; Nichols, 2004). Moreover, a belief in free will is fundamental to our everyday social cognition, and informs much of our intuitions about agency, attribution, and moral responsibility (Nichols & Knobe, 2007; Phillips & Knobe, 2009; Pizarro & Helzer, 2010; Vohs & Schooler, What is the origin of this important belief? Recent studies suggest that even 4-year-olds have the ability to reason about free will (Chernyak et al. 2010; Kushnir et al., 2009). Importantly, preschoolers discriminate between actions which are free and actions which are not free, such as actions in which one is physically or mentally constrained and therefore does not have the choice to do otherwise. However, work on preschoolers’ developing concepts of free will has exclusively focused on children from Western, individualistic societies, in which freedom of choice is stressed from a young age. Do children from more collectivist societies, in which choice is stressed to a lesser degree, share similar intuitions? Past work points to two competing conclusions. On the one hand, free will is thought to be a cognitive universal. A