By the time you are an adult, you know a lot about the
world. You know that dogs bark, that
computers allow you to communicate with people around the planet, that
airplanes fly you from city to city, and that water boils at 100 degrees
Celsius. You also know a lot about
individuals you have met. You know your
mother’s maiden name (which is handy when you need to open a bank
account). You know your best friend’s
favorite color, the toy your aunt’s dog likes to play with, and exact way you
need to unlatch the gate at your grandparents’ house.
Your knowledge about individuals is useful for helping you
to interact with specific situations in the world. Knowing your best friend’s favorite color can
help you buy a gift for her birthday.
Your knowledge about kinds of things (like dogs in general) can help you
to predict what you should expect when you encounter a new dog. Ultimately, you need to learn information
about kinds of things in the world as well as information about the specific
individuals you encounter.
An interesting paper by Andrei Cimpian and JoAnn Park in the
February, 2014 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General examined what 4-
and 5-year-old kids do when they are given a choice to learn about a particular
individual or a kind in general.
In one experiment, children sat with an experimenter who
brought pictures of several unfamiliar animals (like a pangolin and a tarsier). For half the children, the experimenter said
that she was an expert and knew a lot about these animals. For the other half of the children, the
experimenter said she did not know much about the animals, but could guess some
facts about them.
The experimenter showed a picture of an animal and said that
she could tell the child a fact about that particular animal or about that kind
of animal in general. Children would let
the experimenter know what kind of fact they wanted, and they would be given a
fact. Children were able to learn 3
facts for each picture and there were 4 pictures for a total of 12 trials.
When the experimenter said she was just guessing, children
had no preference for getting facts about individuals or kinds. This result makes sense, because the facts
the child is getting are equally useless.
When the experimenter said she knew a lot about the animals, though, the
children wanted information about the kind of animal much more often (64% of
the time) than they wanted information about the individual.
One possibility is that children just want information that
applies to more individuals, and that is why they choose to get facts about the
kind. In a second study, some children
were given the chance to get a fact about the animal pictured or about several
other specific animals that were not in the picture. In this condition, children had no preference
for getting a fact about one animal or a fact about several.
Finally, a third study repeated the first experiment with
familiar animals (like sharks, ants, and crickets). Once again, children had no particular
preference for facts about individuals or kinds when the experimenter said she
didn’t know anything about the animals, but preferred to get facts about the
kind in general when the experimenter said she was an expert.
This result suggests that when young children are around
people with expertise, they want to learn about categories of objects. This bias helps them to learn facts that will
help them to deal with new things that they encounter. This finding also argues against another way
that children could learn about the world.
Children could learn lots of facts about individuals and then try to
generalize those facts to apply to all members of the kind. Instead, children prefer to learn about facts
that apply to the kind.