ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2020
Children's beliefs about causes of human characteristics: Genes, environment, or choice?
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Do Children Think it is Important to Predict Learning and Behaviour Problems, and Do They Think Genetic Screening Has a Role to Play in This?Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2024Article
- Genetic essentialist beliefs about criminality predict harshness of recommended punishment.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2022Article
- Ending genetic essentialism through genetics education.HGG advances · 2022Review
- Categories convey prescriptive information across domains and development.Journal of experimental child psychology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
To what extent do our genes make us nice, smart, or athletic? The explanatory frameworks we employ have broad consequences for how we evaluate and interact with others. Yet to date, little is known regarding when and how young children appeal to genetic explanations to understand human difference. The current study examined children's (aged 7-13 years) and adults' explanations for a set of human characteristics, contrasting genetic attributions with environmental and choice-based attributions. Whereas most adults and older children offered an unprompted genetic explanation at least once on an open-ended task, such explanations were not seen from younger children. However, even younger children, once trained on the mechanism of genes, endorsed genetic explanations for a range of characteristics-often in combination with environment and choice. Moreover, only adults favored genetic explanations for intelligence and athleticism; children, in contrast, favored environment and choice explanations for these characteristics. These findings suggest that children can employ genetic explanations in principled ways as early as 7 years of age but also that such explanations are used to account for a wider range of features by adults. Our study provides some of the first evidence regarding the ways in which genetic attributions emerge and change starting in early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.