Free Will: childhood development of (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, May 04, 2015, 01:59 (3283 days ago) @ David Turell

Not at 4 but by 6:-http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-children-develop-the-idea-of-free-will-1427898899?KEYWORDS=Gopnik-"Philosophers point out that there are different versions of free will. A simple version holds that we exercise our free will when we aren't constrained by outside forces. If the door were locked, I couldn't walk through it, no matter how determined I was. But since it's open, I can choose to go through or not. Saying that we act freely is just saying that we can do what we want when we aren't controlled by outside forces. This poses no problem for science. This version simply says that my actions usually stem from events in my brain—not from the world outside it.-"But we also think that we have free will in a stronger sense. We aren't just free from outside constraints; we can even act against our own desires. I might want the cookie, believe that the cookie is delicious, think that the cookie is healthy. But at the last moment, as a pure act of will, I could simply choose not to eat the cookie.-"But the 4-year-olds didn't understand the second sense of free will. They said that you couldn't simply decide to override your desires. If you wanted the cookie (and Mom said it was OK), you would have to eat it. The 6-year-olds, in contrast, like adults, said that you could simply decide whether to eat the cookie or not, no matter what. When we asked the 6-year-olds why people could act against their desires, many of them talked about a kind of absolute autonomy: “It's her brain, and she can do what she wants” or “Nobody can boss her around.”-"In other studies, in the journal Cognitive Science, Drs. Kushnir and Chernyak found that 4-year-olds also think that people couldn't choose to act immorally. Philosophers and theologians, and most adults, think that to be truly moral, we have to exercise our free will. We could do the wrong thing, but we choose to do the right one. But the 4-year-olds thought that you literally couldn't act in a way that would harm another child. They didn't develop the adult concept until even later, around 8."