Paul L. Harris’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

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Publications (302)


The influence of valence and relationship on children's verification of gossip
  • Article

October 2024

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19 Reads

Zhehua Wan

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Binjie Wang

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Paul L Harris

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Given that children do not always trust gossip, do they spontaneously check what they are told? We provided 5‐ ( N = 32) and 6‐year olds ( N = 32) with gossip concerning characters in a cartoon they were watching, and examined whether they verified the gossip by actively re‐watching the relevant episodes. Six‐year olds were more likely to verify gossip than 5‐year olds. When gossip targeted their favourite characters, children were more likely to verify negative when compared with positive gossip. However, when gossip targeted children's disliked characters, they showed no such valence bias. These results indicate that children's verification of gossip increases with age, and they evaluate claims selectively.


Young Children’s Understanding and Experience of Insight
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  • Full-text available

September 2024

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72 Reads

Developmental Psychology

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An insight is a moment of sudden understanding followed by characteristic feelings of suddenness, positive affect, certainty, and ease, commonly known as an aha experience. Despite evidence from studies with adults that aha experiences benefit learning, little systematic research on children’s aha experiences exists. The present study asks how children understand and experience insight. We presented a community sample of 160 children (age: 4–8 years, 47% girls, 51% boys, 2% nonbinary) with an illustrated clues task inspired by the Remote Associate Test, a task commonly used to study insight in adults. In this task, children saw three clues and were asked to find a solution word that was associated with the three clues. Self-reported and observed aha experiences were recorded, along with children’s solution accuracy and confidence. Children also answered a set of questions to assess their understanding of aha experiences. We found that although the number of aha experiences remained stable across age, there was a clear developmental increase in the understanding of aha experiences. Children’s ability to recognize their own aha experiences as well as their general understanding of the aha concept increased with age. This suggests a lag between the occurrence of children’s aha experiences and their understanding of such experiences; children first have aha experiences and later develop an understanding of those experiences. Aha experiences were associated with higher accuracy, but not with higher confidence ratings. Observed aha experiences, but not self-reported aha experiences, predicted increased motivation. Our findings are in line with the literature on metacognitive development and the distinction between the experience and the understanding of emotion.

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Checking Out the Unexplained: With Age, Children Become Increasingly Skeptical of Surprising Claims

August 2024

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24 Reads

Developmental Psychology

When presented with surprising claims, older children investigate such claims more often than younger children. The present study tests whether older children (6–7-year-olds) are more skeptical than younger children (4–5-year-olds) about surprising claims that lack supporting evidence because they expect informants to provide evidence for them. To test this hypothesis, we presented 140 4–7-year-old children (47–96 months, 46.4% girls, 53.6% boys, 86.4% with at least one parent who completed a BA degree, 50% parents with income above median) with a series of vignettes. In each vignette, the protagonist wanted to accomplish a task and needed to select the most appropriate object for that task. Before deciding which object to use, the protagonist heard a surprising claim about one of the object’s properties, presented with or without supporting evidence. For example, in the supporting explanation condition, the informant stated that the smallest object was the heaviest and that they knew because they had lifted the objects. Children were then asked whether the protagonist knew which object to use and why. Contrary to expectation, children across all ages typically indicated that the protagonist had sufficient knowledge, regardless of whether an informant provided supporting evidence or not. However, with increasing age, children became more skeptical of both supported and unsupported surprising claims and increasingly stated that the protagonist should not select the object suggested by the informant. Finally, when asked to justify this judgment, older children were more likely than younger to express skepticism toward the claims, especially when presented without supporting evidence.


Children’s Understanding and Experience of Insight

June 2024

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14 Reads

An insight is a moment of sudden understanding followed by characteristic feelings of suddenness, positive affect, certainty, and ease, commonly known as an aha-experience. Despite evidence from studies with adults that aha-experiences benefit learning, little systematic research on children’s aha-experiences exists. The current study asks how children understand and experience insight. We presented a community sample of 160 children (age: 4-8 years, 47% girls, 51% boys, 2 % non-binary) with an illustrated clues task inspired by the Remote Associate Test, a task commonly used to study insight in adults. In this task, children saw three clues and were asked to find a solution word that was associated with the three clues. Self-reported and observed aha-experiences were recorded, along with children’s solution accuracy and confidence. Children also answered a set of questions to assess their understanding of aha-experiences. We found that although the number of aha-experiences remained stable across age, there was a clear developmental increase in the understanding of aha-experiences. Children’s ability to recognize their own aha-experiences as well as their general understanding of the aha-concept increased with age. This suggests a lag between the occurrence of children’s aha-experiences and their understanding of such experiences; children first have aha-experiences and later develop an understanding of those experiences. Aha-experiences were associated with higher accuracy, but not with higher confidence ratings. Observed aha-experiences, but not self-reported aha-experiences, predicted increased motivation. Our findings are in line with the literature on metacognitive development, and the distinction between the experience and the understanding of emotion.



Religious polarization and justification of belief in invisible scientific versus religious entities

May 2024

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21 Reads

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1 Citation

Child Development

Children and adults express greater confidence in the existence of invisible scientific as compared to invisible religious entities. To further examine this differential confidence, 5‐ to 11‐year‐old Turkish children and their parents ( N = 174, 122 females) from various regions in Türkiye, a country with an ongoing tension between secularism and religion, were tested in 2021 for their belief in invisible entities. Participants expressed more confidence in the existence of scientific than religious entities. For scientific entities, children justified their belief primarily by elaborating on the properties of the entity, rather than referring to the testimonial source of their judgment. This pattern was reversed for religious entities, arguably, highlighting the role of polarization in shaping the testimony children typically hear.


Experimental materials
a, The test sheet of the math test that children were asked to complete. b, The answer key.
Experimental setup
A schematic depiction of the experimental setup. The answer key was the same size as the child’s test sheet, and the inter-table distance was 0.6 m.
Cheating rates across conditions and studies
Percentage of children who cheated in each condition across the five studies (total N = 328, n = 41 for each condition of each study). The data are presented as the number of children who cheated divided by the total number (n = 41) of children in each condition, with error bars representing 95% CIs. Binary logistic regression analyses showed that in Study 1, the cheating rate in the answer key experimental condition was significantly lower than that in the control condition (Wald = 5.77; d.f. = 1; P = 0.016; OR = 0.33; 95% CI, 0.13 to 0.80; Cohen’s d = −0.61). In Study 2, the cheating rate in the house key experimental condition was significantly lower than that in the house key control condition (Wald = 5.76; d.f. = 1; P = 0.016; OR = 0.33; 95% CI, 0.13 to 0.81; Cohen’s d = −0.61). In Study 3, the cheating rate in the modified house key experimental condition (Version 1) was significantly lower than that in the house key control condition (Wald = 5.77; d.f. = 1; P = 0.016; OR = 0.33; 95% CI, 0.13 to 0.80; Cohen’s d = −0.61). In Study 4, the cheating rate in the modified house key experimental condition (Version 2) did not differ significantly from the control conditions in Studies 1, 2 and 3 (Wald = 1.43, d.f. = 3, P = 0.699). In Study 5, the cheating rate in the modified house key experimental condition (Version 3) did not differ significantly from the control conditions in Studies 1, 2 and 3 (Wald = 2.90, d.f. = 3, P = 0.407). All statistical tests were two-tailed.
Trusting young children to help causes them to cheat less

February 2024

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216 Reads

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1 Citation

Nature Human Behaviour

Trust and honesty are essential for human interactions. Philosophers since antiquity have long posited that they are causally linked. Evidence shows that honesty elicits trust from others, but little is known about the reverse: does trust lead to honesty? Here we experimentally investigated whether trusting young children to help can cause them to become more honest (total N = 328 across five studies; 168 boys; mean age, 5.94 years; s.d., 0.28 years). We observed kindergarten children’s cheating behaviour after they had been entrusted by an adult to help her with a task. Children who were trusted cheated less than children who were not trusted. Our study provides clear evidence for the causal effect of trust on honesty and contributes to understanding how social factors influence morality. This finding also points to the potential of using adult trust as an effective method to promote honesty in children.




Children’s understanding of mixed emotions across cultures

August 2023

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33 Reads

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1 Citation

International Journal of Behavioral Development

This study investigated cross-cultural similarities and variations in children’s developing understanding of mixed emotions. Four- to 9-year-old US ( n = 56) and Chinese ( n = 98) children listened to stories in which the protagonist encountered a situation combining positive and negative components. Children were asked whether the story protagonist would feel the appropriate positive emotion as well as the appropriate negative emotion. Despite being able to recall the positive and negative components of the stories, both US and Chinese children often agreed to only one emotion. However, when children did not agree to only one emotion, US children were more likely than Chinese children to agree to both emotions, whereas Chinese children were more likely than US children to deny both emotions. Overall, the findings confirm that the recognition of mixed emotions is challenging for children under the age of 10. They also suggest, however, that mixed emotions are conceptualized differently in the two cultures: US children tend to assume that positive and negative emotions can coexist whereas Chinese children tend to assume that they neutralize each other.


Citations (76)


... Thus, those who cheat once on a test may be highly likely to cheat again in subse- To this end, we conducted the current research to investigate 5-year-olds' consistency of cheating or honesty in an academic testing situation. In our research, to avoid the interference of material rewards on different children's honesty (Alan et al., 2020), we adopted a non-reward counting test paradigm (Zhao et al., 2020(Zhao et al., , 2021(Zhao et al., , 2022(Zhao et al., , 2024. This paradigm differs from previous tasks with material rewards and only asks children to perform well. ...

Reference:

High consistency of cheating and honesty in early childhood
Trusting young children to help causes them to cheat less

Nature Human Behaviour

... Parental involvement, including their perspective on and appreciation of mathematical performance and success, positively influences students' long-term motivation and achievement in math (Hong et al., 2010;McDonnall et al., 2012;Shukla et al., 2015). Furthermore, there is a positive correlation between the involvement of parents and children in mathematics activities and the children's comprehension of the subject being taught (Yang et al., 2023). It is crucial to remember that varying degrees of parental involvement can have distinct impacts on children's mathematical aptitude (Huang et al., 2021). ...

Chinese parents' support of preschoolers' mathematical development
  • Citing Article
  • August 2023

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

... The increasing demand for religious education is also influenced by parents (Cohen-zada and Elder 2018). Determining children's religiosity in the future is not determined by cognitive or personality factors but by exposure to religion or religious planting from childhood (Payir, Corriveau, and Harris 2023), the level of religiosity is also influenced by childhood experiences with peers (Adam E ) and primary care (Tratner et al. 2020). So, parents choose education for children based on Islam to help instill religious values and foster religious feelings or children's feelings when worshiping. ...

Children’s beliefs in invisible causal agents—Both religious and scientific
  • Citing Chapter
  • June 2023

Advances in Child Development and Behavior

... Investigating these patterns among Iranian children and adults is especially appropriate given recent work documenting biological reasoning about social categories among this group (Shahbazi et al., in press) and other tangentially relevant work among Iranian children and their parents on the role of child-focused conversations as a prominent cultural mechanism for conceptual development (McLoughlin et al., 2023). ...

Expressions of uncertainty in invisible scientific and religious phenomena during naturalistic conversation

Cognition

... Causal judgements about past events, for instance, have been proposed to rely on counterfactual simulation, with experiments showing that adults tend to judge that object X caused event Y if and only if event Y would not have eventuated in the case that object X was absent [69,70]. Counterfactual thinking also supports moral judgements, such that people (including children aged 6 years and older [71,72]) tend to make stronger judgements about a character's 'good' or 'bad' past action if that character had a counterfactual choice available to them at the time. People similarly tend to make stronger judgements about their own past actions if there were counterfactual alternatives available at the time [73][74][75]. ...

Being nice by choice: The effect of counterfactual reasoning on children's social evaluations
  • Citing Article
  • April 2023

Developmental Science

... Accordingly, Educational Robotics (ER) arises as an innovative teaching aid tool, suitable for all ages [6], [7]. It may support children in developing various skills, [8], [9], [10], constructing new knowledge playfully, creating while programming, communicating, and collaborating in openended activities, meaningful to them, [11] from an early age [12], [13], [14]. Hence, kindergarten may be an ideal setting for that [15]. ...

Can a robot lie? Young children's understanding of intentionality beneath false statements
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

Infant and Child Development

... Granted these points, it seems likely that an additional cognitive mechanism is needed to explain young children's receptivity to religious activities and the beliefs that guide them. Building on earlier proposals, we speculate that children's facility at charitable attributions to others, especially in the context of joint pretend play, offers such a mechanism (Harris, 2012;2022a;Van Leeuwen, in press). ...

From Charitable Inference to Active Credence

Scientia et Fides

... Consistent with the philosophical perspective that moral goodness plays an important role in happiness (Aristotle, 305 B.C./2009;Foot, 2003), the impact of moral judgments on perceived happiness manifests early in life and persists into adulthood (e.g., Chen et al., 2023;Phillips et al., 2011Phillips et al., , 2017Prinzing et al., 2023;Yang et al., 2021). For example, in one study, 4-to 9-year-olds and adults consistently perceived mean individuals as less happy than nice and neutral individuals, even if both could get everything they wanted (Yang et al., 2021). ...

Beyond Enjoyment: Young Children Consider the Normative Goodness of Activity Engagement When Attributing Happiness

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

... However, such efforts may be useless if individuals are inhibited from engaging in out-party empathy, not because they lack the ability to empathize, but because they worry about what fellow in-party members might think of them if they did. Such in-party meta-perceptions, i.e. concerns about how one is perceived by fellow party members, including the fear of negative judgment, being labeled a traitor, facing punishment, or even social ostracism might make partisans opt not to even consider empathizing with the other side (15)(16)(17)(18). To understand and address hostile political divides, we must consider the interaction between individuals and collectives, accounting for the social structures and dynamics involved (19). ...

Do Bad People Deserve Empathy? Selective Empathy Based on Targets’ Moral Characteristics
  • Citing Article
  • December 2022

Affective Science

... A recurrent finding is that children's understanding of emotions tends to lag behind their experience of emotions (Harris, 1989). As in the case of metacognition, procedural and declarative aspects of emotion understanding may follow separate developmental trajectories (Viana et al., 2022). It is plausible that the same is true for aha experiences. ...

Children’s Emotion Understanding and Cooperative Problem-Solving in Educational Settings
  • Citing Article
  • January 2022