Department of Psychology.
School of Public Health.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2020 Oct;149(10):1935-1949. doi: 10.1037/xge0000751. Epub 2020 Mar 19.
To what extent do our genes make us nice, smart, or athletic? The explanatory frameworks we employ have broad consequences for how we evaluate and interact with others. Yet to date, little is known regarding when and how young children appeal to genetic explanations to understand human difference. The current study examined children's (aged 7-13 years) and adults' explanations for a set of human characteristics, contrasting genetic attributions with environmental and choice-based attributions. Whereas most adults and older children offered an unprompted genetic explanation at least once on an open-ended task, such explanations were not seen from younger children. However, even younger children, once trained on the mechanism of genes, endorsed genetic explanations for a range of characteristics-often in combination with environment and choice. Moreover, only adults favored genetic explanations for intelligence and athleticism; children, in contrast, favored environment and choice explanations for these characteristics. These findings suggest that children can employ genetic explanations in principled ways as early as 7 years of age but also that such explanations are used to account for a wider range of features by adults. Our study provides some of the first evidence regarding the ways in which genetic attributions emerge and change starting in early childhood. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
我们的基因在多大程度上决定了我们的善良、聪明或运动能力？我们所采用的解释框架对我们如何评价和与他人互动有着广泛的影响。然而，迄今为止，我们对于儿童何时以及如何利用遗传解释来理解人类差异知之甚少。本研究考察了儿童（7-13 岁）和成年人对一系列人类特征的解释，将遗传归因与环境和基于选择的归因进行对比。尽管大多数成年人和年龄较大的儿童在开放式任务中至少一次自发地给出了遗传解释，但年龄较小的儿童没有给出这种解释。然而，即使是年龄较小的儿童，一旦接受了基因机制的训练，也会对一系列特征给出遗传解释——通常与环境和选择相结合。此外，只有成年人支持智力和运动能力的遗传解释；相比之下，儿童则支持环境和选择解释这些特征。这些发现表明，儿童早在 7 岁就可以以原则性的方式使用遗传解释，但这些解释也被成年人用来解释更广泛的特征。我们的研究提供了一些关于遗传归因从儿童早期开始出现和变化的方式的首批证据。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2020 APA，保留所有权利）。
