Society & Culture - Posted by Hilary Hurd Anyaso-Northwestern on Monday, May 17, 2010 17:14 - 3 Comments 
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(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Urban kids view the world in human terms
Urban children are far more likely to develop a human-centered pattern of reasoning than their counterparts raised in a rural environment. (Credit: iStockphoto)
NORTHWESTERN (US)—The way children develop reasoning about the natural world is largely influenced by how and where they are raised, a new study finds.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
For decades, the consensus was that as young children begin reasoning about the biological world, they adopt an “anthropocentric” stance, favoring humans over non-human animals when it comes to learning about properties of animals. But it appears human-centered reasoning among children is not universal after all.
In a study, which appeared in the journal Cognitive Development, researchers at Northwestern University teamed with researchers and educators from the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin to determine whether this human-centered (or anthropocentric) reasoning is universal.
They were interested in whether such reasoning is influenced by children’s experience with the natural world and the culture and belief systems of their communities.
To examine these potential influences, the study included children growing up in an urban setting (Chicago) as well as children from rural Wisconsin, who have more extensive direct contact with the natural world.
To examine the influence of culture, the rural community included European-American and Native American (Menominee) children.
The results were striking—while young urban children revealed a human-centered pattern of reasoning, the rural European-American and Native-American children did not.
Children’s experience, including the extent of their day-to-day interactions with the natural world and their sensitivity to the belief systems of their communities, influences their reasoning about the natural world.
For example, the researchers noted that while children generally are taught in school that only plants and animals are alive, the traditional Menominee notion of “alive” includes natural inanimates, such as rocks and water, and may even include artifacts, depending on the purpose for which they were made.
Such cultural differences provide strong evidence that the human-centered pattern displayed by young urban children is not a universal starting point for development, as researchers and educators had previously assumed, explains Sandra Waxman, professor of psychology at Northwestern University.
“Instead, this human-centered style of reasoning is itself culturally inflected,” says Waxman. “It may, in fact, reflect a cultural model that is prevalent in the media for young children, for example, stories and films in which animals talk, sing, and act like humans.”
More news from Northwestern: www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/
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3 Comments
Bill Gates
Natural sciences: experiment -based. real thing.
social sciences: fake sciences phony fake sciences.
all social sciences is just bull-session BS session in class to keep 18-22 year olds off the streets drugs crime and boredom
Reasoning
Bill,
Speaking of, there was a study conducted that demonstrates that people feel more competent in their ability to answer social science related questions even if they are underestimating their ability of doing so. It goes as far back as appearing during development.
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/03/childs-play-developmental-roots-of.html
Which explains why people often consider social sciences like Psychology to be “easier” to understand than say, natural sciences like Chemistry and Physics.
Cheers.
Why does research always lag behind the intuitive world? Because with intuition, a guidance system we humans have suppressed for these very reasons as stated in your article, exposure to human based values over nature, we have lost our innate sixth sense. Luckily not for good. We humans have an incredible ability to recover that which is innately ours, namely our ability to use our mind to return to our original selves: gods and goddesses within human form.