当考虑可能性时,人们可以同时考虑认识论原则和道义原则(即,物理可能性和可容许性)。文化影响可能会导致个人对认识论和道义义务的权衡不同;因此,发展中的可能性概念被定位为受文化环境的影响。在两项研究中,251美国和中国4-,6-,从德克萨斯州和湖北的主要大都市地区采样的8岁儿童,四川,甘肃,广东省判断了不可能的可能性,不可能,和普通事件。在不同的文化和年龄,孩子们认为普通事件是可能的,不可能的事件是不可能的;在发展不可能事件的概念中出现了文化差异。然而,随着年龄的增长,美国儿童更有可能判断这些事件,中国儿童的判断与年龄保持一致:中国4至8岁的儿童认为这些事件是可能的~25%的时间。在研究2中,为了测试这种差异是否归因于认知约束与道义约束的不同优先级,孩子们还判断每个事件是否是认知违反(即,需要魔法发生)和执事违反(即,会导致某人陷入困境)。随着年龄的增长,认知判断越来越多地预测美国儿童不可能发生的事件的可能性判断,对中国孩子来说也是如此。与我们的预测相反,Deontic判断不是预测性的。我们认为,规范的文化评估可能会影响儿童对可能性的发展直觉。我们根据可能性概念的三个解释来讨论我们的发现,提出将文化背景融入其中的方法。
When thinking about possibility, one can consider both epistemic and deontic principles (i.e., physical possibility and permissibility). Cultural influences may lead individuals to weigh epistemic and deontic obligations differently; developing possibility conceptions are therefore positioned to be affected by cultural surroundings. Across two studies, 251 U.S. and Chinese 4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds sampled from major metropolitan areas in Texas and the Hubei, Sichuan, Gansu, and Guangdong Provinces judged the possibility of impossible, improbable, and ordinary events. Across cultures and ages, children judged ordinary events as possible and impossible events as impossible; cultural differences emerged in developing conceptions of improbable events. Whereas U.S. children became more likely to judge these events possible with age, Chinese children\'s judgments remained consistent with age: Chinese 4- to 8-year-olds judged these events to be possible ∼25% of the time. In Study 2, to test whether this difference was attributable to differential prioritization of epistemic versus deontic constraints, children also judged whether each event was an epistemic violation (i.e., required magic to happen) and a deontic violation (i.e., would result in someone getting in trouble). With age, epistemic judgments were increasingly predictive of possibility judgments for improbable events for U.S. children, and decreasingly so for Chinese children. Contrary to our predictions, deontic judgments were not predictive. We propose that cultural valuation of norms might shape children\'s developing intuitions about possibility. We discuss our findings in light of three accounts of possibility conceptions, suggesting ways to integrate cultural context into each.