PAPER REVIEW

By

M.Karthikeyan

A Comparison of Nepalese and American Children’s Concepts of Free Will Nadia Chernyak (nc98@cornell.edu), Tamar Kushnir (tk397@cornell.edu), Katherine M. Sullivan (kms278@cornell.edu), & Qi Wang (qw33@cornell.edu) Department of Human Development, Martha Van Rensselaer Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 USA .

The main focus of the authors is to bring out the the cultural,social,moral and developmental differences in the concept of free will ,if any ,in American and Nepalese children and to analyse the results obtained.

An individual is doing what he or she is doing because they fall along his/her desires , and it is human nature to do what one desires.I could have done otherwise if I wanted to .( Baer, Kaufman, & Baumeister, 2008) .Such an idea of free will is being put forth by the authors.The concept of free will is something that is engrained into every individual by birth and certain aspects of free will are highly susceptible to fluctuate with time,upbringing and external influences while some stand the test of time,societal and moral factors. Free will knowingly or unknowingly is being implemented by us in our day to day actions. (Nichols & Knobe, 2007; Phillips & Knobe, 2009; Pizarro & Helzer, 2010; Vohs & Schooler, 2008).The authors have carried out their experiments on 4-11 year old children from the collectivistic(constraint driven decisions) societies of Nepal and the individualistic(choice driven decisions) societies of America.The author’s work also has certain essence from the works of (Sarkissian, Chatterjee, De Brigard, Knobe, Nichols, & Sirker, in press) on the universal similarity of basic free will thoughts.I commend their choice of American and Nepalese children due to the wide differences in familial,social ,moral and cultural obligaitons between people these two nations.Nepalese have a strong belief in constraints,respect for tradition and have deep oriental thinking , whereas their American counterparts construe even mundane daily simple actions as choice driven.The wide age range of children taken is justified by the fact that cultural differences increase with time(Miller, 1984; Wang 2004).

Pre Experimental analysis

The authors divided decision making situations, encountered by children into three categories.

1. Simple Unconstrained Actions

2. Physically and Mentally constrained actions

3. Socially constrained actions

Based on the above points the authors hypothesised the following :

1. Grassroot level,fundamental early developing notions of the complementarity of freedom and constraint will be intrinsic to both American and Nepalese children.That unconstrained actions are freely chosen while physically and mentally constrained actions are not.

2. A clear demarcation should be seen in choices with increasing social , cultural influences and with age.

3. The authors are basically trying to prove that there is some commonality between Nepalese and American children regarding simple unconstrained actions.And as the children grow up Nepalese children tend to abstain from deviating from the rules and regulations dictated by the family and culture whereas in the case of Americans there is an increase in the rebellious attitude , tendency to question conventions and to lay more emphasis on freedom of choice.

Experimental Procedure

The authors used a real clever approach of developing a questionnaire of 9 questions that tackled all aspects of free will that they wanted to test and was also highly appealing to tiny tots aged 4-11.

Every question tested two opinions , one was whether a person can do an act and the second was whether the person will do the act. Fifty-two Nepalese children aged 4-11 (M = 8.02, SD = 1.94) participated and 32 American children aged 4-11 (M = 7.06, SD = 1.83) were used.All the children were interviewed in a peaceful environment with no external influence on results involved.Americans were tested in English and the Nepalese in their native language.Given below are the 9 categories and one question in each of them.The first three are universal whereas the remaining six are age and culture dependent notion based questions.

(Nadia Chenyak,Tamar Kushnir,Katherine M.Sullivan,Qi Wang,2011)

Logically speaking the question evokes two responses , one is the decision making process (Free will judgement) and the other is the decision implementation process (Action Prediction).

1 DECISION IMPLEMENTED yes(1) or no(0)

DECISION MADE

0 DECISION IMPLEMENTED yes(1) or no(0)

After the experiment was performed these were the results noted:

Results

1. Analysis of results for the first three questions that focussed on basic universal and common notions of free will.

(Nadia Chenyak,Tamar Kushnir,Katherine M.Sullivan,Qi Wang,2011)

It is pretty obvious from the above figure that both Nepalese and American children share the intuitive idea that simple free actions are free and truly constrained actions are not. American (29/32; 91%) and Nepalese children (46/52; 88%) answered that the characters had the Free Will in performing simple unconstrained actions, Binomial p’s < .001. In contrast, the majority of both American and Nepalese children felt that the characters did not have the Free Will to act against Physical Laws (American: 30/32 (94%); Nepalese: 35/52 (67%)), or against Mental Constraints (American: 22/32 (69%); Nepalese: 34/52 (65%)), Binomial p’s ≤ .05. Thus, children in both cultures share the complementary intuitions that some actions are freely willed and some are not free.

2. The results of questions that targeted social and culturally constrained opinions were then analysed.

A regression analysis was performed with free will judgement score (0-6) as the dependent variable and culture , age and age x culture interaction as predictor varibales. Each child had an over all score between 0-6 for free will judgements and the values had a reliability of 0.80. As expected there was a significant effect of both culture and age as shown below. There was a significant main effect of culture (β = 9.39, SE = 1.70), t(79) = 5.51, p < .001, a significant main effect of age (β = .86,

SE = .18), t(79) = 4.67, p < .001, and a significant culture x age interaction (β = -1.26, SE = .23), t(79) = -5.60, p < .001. We can easily observe that there is a tendency to value free will amongst Americans while it was the opposite in the case of Nepalese.

(Nadia Chenyak,Tamar Kushnir,Katherine M.Sullivan,Qi Wang,2011)

Similarly a regression analysis was performed in the case of action prediction scores.That is how does age, culture and agexculture predictor values affect what children think about whether an action must be done or not. For the

American children, age positively predicted Action prediction scores (β = .58, SE = .19), t(29) = 3.13, p < .01.Cronbach value = 0.71.This indicates that with increase in age Americans children’s respect for social values kept decreasing whereas it almost remained the same(initial stage value) for the Nepalese.

(Nadia Chenyak,Tamar Kushnir,Katherine M.Sullivan,Qi Wang,2011)

Interpreting the results

1. The analysis pin points the fact that there is some intrinsic basic concept of free will that is present in every individual by birth.Children in both US and Nepal state that simple acts like choosing a pen instead of a pencil are free and acts violating physical and mental acts are not.

2. The authors also proved that younger Nepali children were more likely to break social norms , conventions and rules compared to the older ones.

3. American children naturally acted on their preferences compared to Their Nepali counterparts and this tendency increased with age (Liu, Wellman, & Tardif, & Sabbagh, 2006; Wellman & Miller, 2006).

4. A notion that is common between both cultures is that with time we realise that responsibility and obligation are the motivators of action even if they contradict with our preferences.

Some drawbacks of the analysis in my opinion would be the very small sample used and the immaturity involved.Second the decision making processes that the children were subjected to were highly simple whereas in reality we deal with bigger problems that involve free will.There is a lot of difference between free will decisions made thoughtfully and free will decisions made in seconds!!

But I do appreciate the fact that the authors brought out the concepts of culture,society and age as factors for free will action determinism in a highly succinct and simple manner.

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