Paul L Harris
Biographic Data
| ID | 193985 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul L Harris |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul L |
| FAMILY NAME | Harris |
| SIGNATURE | HARRIS P L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Harvard University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4907-0539 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 113 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 332 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 113 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1971 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Young Children Use the Discourse Marker “But” to Provide Clarifications in Everyday Conversations
To communicate effectively, speakers must monitor and refine their utterances based on what their interlocutors know. Young children’s use of the contrastive marker but offers a window into this ability. Using longitudinal transcripts, we examined how seven children (ages 2–5) used but to clarify messages in everyday conversations. We coded 1,446 utterances to identify clarifications addressing gaps in listener knowledge. Children rarely used but…
Children doubt magic but believe in miracles
Self‐other asymmetries in young children's talk about the mind
Young children's spontaneous production of mental state utterances involving want , know , and think differed markedly depending on the target of the utterance. Whereas children's affirmations and denials mostly pertained to their own mental states rather than those of others, their questions mostly pertained to the mental states of others rather than their own. This asymmetry was evident for all three mental state verbs, and among both English‐s…
Children revise their emotion attributions in light of the broader temporal context
Do children infer other’s emotions from situational information, and do they revise their inferences when provided with additional information about the broader temporal context? We invited 333 children ( M age = 72.67 months, range = 47–99 months, 56% girls, 44% boys) to look at pictures of a child protagonist seated next to a set of toys—first in the company of another child and then alone. The protagonist’s facial expression was never visible …
Revisiting Persistence in Developmental Psychology: An Integrative Framework for Flexible Persistence
In developmental and educational psychology, persistence is primarily conceptualized as sustained and independent effort exerted over a relatively short period on a single task. We propose a more unified and integrative framework in which persistence is understood as part of dynamic, flexible – and potentially adaptive – self-regulatory processes. These processes involve various temporary and intermediate strategies and decisions at any given tim…
Children’s absorption in fiction: Self-reports by avid and occasional readers
From the “Here and Now” to the “There and Then”: How parent–child decontextualized conversations support early development
Block play by American and Chinese families: Associations with children's spatial ability
Telling young children an adult’s emotional reactions to their future honest or dishonest behavior causes them to cheat less
The current research examined whether telling young children about an adult's emotional reactions to their future honesty or dishonesty influences their cheating. In five preregistered studies, children aged 3-6 years participated in a challenging test, purportedly to assess their knowledge but actually to measure their honesty ( N = 480; 240 boys; all middle-class Han Chinese). Telling 5- to 6-year-olds about a familiar adult's negative emotiona…
Young children’s understanding and experience of insight
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 ye…
Moral Judgment and Cheating: Evidence of A Knowledge–Behavior Link in Early Childhood
This research with two studies examined whether young children's moral judgments of honesty and dishonesty predict their actual cheating behavior. Participants were 200 children aged 3–6 years (2021–2022. Study 1: N = 80, Mage = 4.96, 40 girls; Study 2: N = 120, Mage = 4.98, 60 girls; all middle-class Han Chinese). Children completed a temptation resistance paradigm assessing honest or cheating behaviors. They also made moral judgments about stor…
American and Chinese parents’ math talk during numeracy and routine activities: Do parental beliefs matter
Religious polarization and justification of belief in invisible scientific versus religious entities
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 conf…
Checking out the unexplained: With age, children become increasingly skeptical of surprising claims
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,…
Trusting young children to help causes them to cheat less
Young children’s representation of people who are elsewhere—Or dead
Given the legacy of John Bowlby, Attachment theory has often portrayed separation from a caregiver as likely to provoke protest, despair, and ultimately detachment in infants and young children. Indeed, the emotional challenge of separation is built into a key measurement tool of Attachment theory, the Strange Situation. However, James Robertson, one of Bowlby’s leading collaborators, voiced dissent. He argued that young children can cope with se…
Children’s understanding of mixed emotions across cultures
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 b…
Young children's conceptualization of empirical disagreement
Expressions of uncertainty in invisible scientific and religious phenomena during naturalistic conversation
Older children verify adult claims because they are skeptical of those claims
We investigated children's information seeking in response to a surprising claim (Study 1, N = 109, 54 Female, Range = 4.02—6.94 years, 49% White, 21% Mixed Ethnicity, 19% Southeast Asian, September 2019—March 2020; Study 2, N = 154, 74 Female, Range = 4.09—7.99, 50% White, 20% Mixed Ethnicity, 17% Southeast Asian, September 2020—December 2020). Relative to younger children, older children more often expressed skepticism about the adult's surpris…
Children’s Emotion Understanding and Cooperative Problem-Solving in Educational Settings
Recent research has shown that emotion understanding (EU)—the capacity to understand the nature, causes, and consequences of emotions—plays a crucial role in the development of emotional, social, and cognitive competences. However, there are still many unanswered questions about the extent to which EU facilitates children’s cooperative problem-solving in educational settings. For instance, it is not yet clear how understanding emotions positively…
Missing persons: Young children's talk about absent members of their social network
Little is known about young children's ability to talk about absent members of their social network. We analyzed the speech of four children from 2 to 5 years. References to absent caregivers were relatively frequent, even when children were 2 years old. Such references were often generated spontaneously rather than being repetitions of a name produced by the child's interlocutor. Children's comments about absent family members occasionally expre…
Evidence for similar conceptual progress across diverse cultures in children’s understanding of emotion
Research with adults has increasingly moved beyond the focus on a small set of allegedly basic emotions, each associated with a signature facial expression. That expansion has been accompanied by a greater emphasis on the potential variability of emotion concepts across different cultural settings. In this conceptual review of children’s understanding of emotion, we argue that it is also important in developmental research to look beyond the smal…
A counting intervention promotes fair sharing in preschoolers
Recent work has probed the developmental mechanisms that promote fair sharing. This work investigated 2.5- to 5.5-year-olds’ (N = 316; 52% female; 79% White; data collected 2016–2018) sharing behavior in relation to three cognitive correlates: number knowledge, working memory, and cognitive control. In contrast to working memory and cognitive control, number knowledge was uniquely associated with fair sharing even after controlling for the other …
From Charitable Inference to Active Credence
Young children routinely display a naturalistic understanding of the world. When asked for explanations, they rarely invoke supernatural or religious explanations even when confronted by puzzling or unexpected phenomena. Nevertheless, depending on the surrounding culture, children are eventually prone to accept God as a creator, to believe in the power of prayer and to expect there to be an afterlife. A plausible interpretation of this dual stanc…
Understanding Mortality and the Life of the Ancestors in Rural Madagascar
Across two studies, a wide age range of participants was interviewed about the nature of death. All participants were living in rural Madagascar in a community where ancestral beliefs and practices are widespread. In Study 1, children (8-17 years) and adults (19-71 years) were asked whether bodily and mental processes continue after death. The death in question was presented in the context of a narrative that focused either on the corpse or on th…
The Coexistence of Natural and Supernatural Explanations Across Cultures and Development
Although often conceptualized in contradictory terms, the common assumption that natural and supernatural explanations are incompatible is psychologically inaccurate. Instead, there is considerable evidence that the same individuals use both natural and supernatural explanations to interpret the very same events and that there are multiple ways in which both kinds of explanations coexist in individual minds. Converging developmental research from…
Preschoolers monitor the relative accuracy of informants
In 2 studies, the sensitivity of 3- and 4-year-olds to the previous accuracy of informants was assessed. Children viewed films in which 2 informants labeled familiar objects with differential accuracy (across the 2 experiments, children were exposed to the following rates of accuracy by the more and less accurate informants, respectively: 100% vs. 0%, 100% vs. 25%, 75% vs. 0%, and 75% vs. 25%). Next, children watched films in which the same 2 inf…
Preschoolers (sometimes) defer to the majority in making simple perceptual judgments
Three- and 4-year-old children were asked to judge which of a set of 3 lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among adult informants. Children were invariably accurate when making independent judgments but sometimes deferred to the inaccurate consensus. Nevertheless, the deference displayed by both age groups proved to be circumscribed. When asked to solve a practical problem--selecting the longest st…
Deception by young children following noncompliance
Children Who Choose Not to Eat Meat: A Study of Early Moral Decision‐making
Can young children frame their own choices in terms of moral considerations, particularly when those choices do not match the practices of immediate authority figures? To answer this question, we studied 6‐ to 10‐year‐old independent vegetarians—children who have elected to become vegetarians, despite being raised in non‐vegetarian families. In Study 1, these children were asked about their reasons for not eating meat; their replies were compared…
In Cinderella's slippers? Story comprehension from the protagonist's point of view
Research on text comprehension shows that readers construct a model of the situation described in a narrative. A major factor in constructing a situational model is the perspective from which the action of the narrative is imagined. J. B. Black, T. J. Turner, and G. H. Bower (1979) found that adults recall a deictic verb of motion more accurately if it is spatially consistent with the point of view of the main protagonist. Recall is more accurate…
Confronting, Representing, and Believing Counterintuitive Concepts: Navigating the Natural and the Supernatural
Recent research shows that even preschoolers are skeptical; they frequently reject claims from other people when the claims conflict with their own perceptions and concepts. Yet, despite their skepticism, both children and adults come to believe in a variety of phenomena that defy their first-hand perceptions and intuitive conceptions of the world. In this review, we explore how children and adults acquire such concepts. We describe how a similar…
Children's Acceptance of Conflicting Testimony: The Case of Death
Children aged 7 and 11 years were interviewed about death in the context of two different narratives. Each narrative described the death of a grandparent but one narrative provided a secular context whereas the other provided a religious context. Following each narrative, children were asked to judge whether various bodily and mental processes continue to function after death, and to justify their judgment. Children displayed two different concep…
Numerical cognition explains age-related changes in third-party fairness
Young children share fairly and expect others to do the same. Yet little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanisms that support fairness. We investigated whether children's numerical competencies are linked with their sharing behavior. Preschoolers (aged 2.5-5.5) participated in third-party resource allocation tasks in which they split a set of resources between 2 puppets. Children's numerical competence was assessed using the Give-N tas…
Monoracial and Biracial Children: Effects of Racial Identity Saliency on Social Learning and Social Preferences
Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in-group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses. In the social preferences t…
Accuracy trumps accent in children's endorsement of object labels
Past research provides evidence that children use at least 2 potentially competing strategies when choosing informants: they attend to informants' past accuracy and to their social identity (e.g., their status as native- vs. foreign-accented speakers). We explore how children reconcile these 2 strategies when they are put in conflict and whether children's response changes across development. In Experiment 1 (N = 61), 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old child…
The development of reasoning about beliefs: Fact, preference, and ideology
Dualism Revisited: Body vs. Mind vs. Soul
A large, diverse sample of adults was interviewed about their conception of the ontological and functional properties of the mind as compared to the soul. The existence of the mind was generally tied to the human lifecycle of conception, birth, growth and death, and was primarily associated with cognitive as opposed to spiritual functions. In contrast, the existence of the soul was less systematically tied to the lifecycle and frequently associat…
The Ghost in My Body: Children's Developing Concept of the Soul
Two experiments were conducted to explore whether children, who have been exposed to the concept of the soul, differentiate the soul from the mind. In the first experiment, 4- to 12-year-old children were asked about whether a religious ritual affects the mind, the brain, or the soul. The majority of the children claimed that only the soul was different after baptism. In a follow-up study, 6- to 12-year-old children were tested more explicitly on…
When does and ostrich become a bird? The role of typicality in early word comprehension
Which objects and animals are children willing to accept as referents for words they know? To answer this question, the authors assessed early word comprehension using the preferential looking task. Children were shown 2 stimuli side by side (a target and a distractor) and heard the target stimulus named. The target stimulus was either a typical or an atypical exemplar of the named category. It was predicted that children first connect typical ex…
Distinguishing between realistic and fantastical figures in Iran
Children in the United States come to distinguish historical from fictional story figures between the ages of 3 and 5 years, guided by the plausibility of the story events surrounding the figure (Corriveau, Kim, Schwalen, & Harris, 2009; Woolley & Cox, 2007). However, U.S. children vary in their reactions to stories that include fantastical events. Secular children with no religious education think of such stories and their protagonists as fictio…
More than meets the eye: Young children’s trust in claims that defy their perceptions
Children and adults often encounter counterintuitive claims that defy their perceptions. We examined factors that influence children's acceptance of such claims. Children ages 3-6 years were shown familiar objects (e.g., a rock), were asked to identify the objects, and were then told that each object was something else (e.g., that the rock was soap). For some children, informants explicitly stated that the objects were different from what they ap…
Young children's comprehension of pretend causal sequences
In 2 experiments, preschoolers'ability to understand pretend transformations was assessed. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds watched 5 episodes in which 1 of 2 similar props was altered in a pretend fashion. Children's pretend responses showed that they understood these transformations. In Experiment 2, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds watched 6 episodes in which either a single or a double pretend transformation was carried out. In the single transform…
Young Children’s Deference to a Consensus Varies by Culture and Judgment Setting
Three- and 4-year-old Asian-American and Caucasian-American children were asked to judge which of a set of three lines was the longest, both independently and in the face of an inaccurate consensus among informants. Half of the children made their judgments privately; the other half made their judgments with the experimenter present. In the private setting, children were mostly resistant to the incorrect testimony from the consensus. By contrast,…
Imagining the outcome of pretend transformations: Assessing the competence of normal children and children with autism
Children's grasp of make-believe transformations was studied. In Experiment 1, children saw an adult enact a pretend change (e.g., sprinkling pretend talcum powder over a toy cat). They indicated the pretend outcome by choosing between a picture depicting no change (e.g., cat without talcum powder on its body) and a picture depicting the pretend change (e.g., cat covered with talcum powder). Older children (M=29 months) chose correctly, but young…
Religious testimony in a secular society: Belief in unobservable entities among Chinese parents and their children
When learning about the existence of unobservable scientific phenomena such as germs or religious phenomena such as God, children are receptive to the testimony of other people. Research in Western cultures has shown that by 5 to 6 years of age, children-like adults-are confident about the existence of both scientific and religious phenomena. We examined the beliefs of secular and Christian children growing up in China as well as the beliefs of t…
God, Germs, and Evolution: Belief in Unobservable Religious and Scientific Entities in the U.S. and China
Dax gets the nod: Toddlers detect and use social cues to evaluate testimony
Children ages 18 and 24 months were assessed for the ability to understand and learn from an adult's nonverbal expression of agreement and disagreement with a speaker's claims. In one type of communicative exchange, a speaker made 2 different claims about the identity or location of an object. The hearer nodded her head in agreement with one claim and shook her head in disagreement with the other claim. In a second type of exchange, the speaker a…
Entitled to Trust? Philosophical Frameworks and Evidence from Children
How do children acquire beliefs from testimony? In this chapter, we discuss children's trust in testimony, their sensitivity to and use of defeaters, and their appeals to positive reasons for trusting what other people tell them. Empirical evidence shows that, from an early age, children have a tendency to trust testimony. However, this tendency to trust is accompanied by sensitivity to cues that suggest unreliability, including inaccuracy of the…
Examination and Search in Infants
Infants aged 8 months and 1 year were compared in their search for an object following visual presentation, for various intervals of time, either with or without manual contact. The major finding was that if manual contact was allowed, the younger infants searched as persistently as older infants. If the object was only seen prior to its disappearance, the younger group searched much less persistently. The findings are related to the development …
Eye Movements Between Adjacent Stimuli: An Age Change in Infancy
Infants aged 6 months were found to shift their attention from one stimulus to a second adjacent stimulus more frequently than infants aged 3 months. This age difference was found when the two stimuli differed, but not when the stimuli were identical. The findings indicate a tendency to seek out stimulus change on the part of older infants
Tracking by Young Infants
Tracking by infants aged 8–28 weeks is shown to be supported by the displacement of an object relative to a background. When object and background move together tracking is disrupted. This disruption in tracking is shown to be due to the absence of relative displacement between object and background and not to movement of the background as such. The absence of relative displacement reduces the duration of pursuit but does not alter the frequency …
Inferences and semantic development
Three experiments with children between 5 and 7 years are described. It is shown that nominal predication of an unknown word by a superordinate term enables young children to make appropriate inferences concerning its attributes. The provision of distinguishing attributes also permits the child to differentiate the unfamiliar word from hyponyms of the superordinate. The results are discussed in relation to semantic development and reasoning in th…
Transitive inferences by 4-year-old children
Development of search and object permanence during infancy
Cognitive processes and collective representations
Anthropologists typically adopt the assumption of psychic unity: man universally exhibits the same fundamental cognitive processes. Hence, any apparent heterogeneity in collective representations may not be explained by psychological postulates. On the basis of recent cross-cultural studies of cognitive processes, we move beyond this standard anthropological assumption, arguing that there is cultural variability in the mode of thinking which is e…
Ambiguity of reference and listeners' reaction in a naturalistic setting
The present study asked three questions. To what extent does the pre-school child use pronouns ambiguously in a naturalistic situation? Under what circumstances is such referential ambiguity likely to arise? How does the pre-school listener respond to such ambiguity? Sixteen pre-schoolers, four pairs of boys and four pairs of girls, were videotaped in a play situation. The results indicate that ambiguity of reference frequently arises, especially…
Experimenting with children's language: A commentary
Knowledge of the link between emotion and memory among normal and maladjusted boys
Is the English present progressive unique
The ‘problem of the error-free progressive’ (Brown 5973) was reexamined. It was hypothesized that young children make errors with the progressive as part of a developmental process. An experiment designed to elicit present-tense verbs is described, using 36 pictures, illustrating 9 process and g stative verbs. Twenty-two children (4; 2 to 6; 6) were tested: all responded mainly in the present tense, and 10 out of 22 produced over-generalizations …
Decrement in the understanding of big among English-and Spanish-speaking children
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The early acquisition of spatial adjectives: A cross-linguistic study
In two experiments, the early acquisition of spatial adjectives is examined. In Experiment 1, 3- to 4-year-old and 4- to 5-year-old English children were tested for their comprehension of big, tall and long . In general, comprehension of all three adjectives improved with age, but in confirmation of Maratsos (1973) there was a sharp increase with age in one particular type of error: when asked to select the bigger of two objects, older children f…
Uneasy Union and Neglected Children: Cultural Psychology and its Prospects Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development. James W. Stigler , Richard A. Shweder , Gilbert Herdt
Young children's comprehension of pretend causal sequences
In 2 experiments, preschoolers'ability to understand pretend transformations was assessed. In Experiment 1, 3- and 4-year-olds watched 5 episodes in which 1 of 2 similar props was altered in a pretend fashion. Children's pretend responses showed that they understood these transformations. In Experiment 2, 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds watched 6 episodes in which either a single or a double pretend transformation was carried out. In the single transform…
Thinking by children and scientists: False analogies and neglected similarities
In this chapter, I distinguish among three types of cognitive activity: the cognitive processes of children; the cognitive processes of individual scientists; and the collective, public enterprise that constitutes the history of science. I propose that when we focus on individual scientists rather than the organized discipline within which they work, there are some neglected similarities between the way that they think and the way that young chil…
Imagining the outcome of pretend transformations: Assessing the competence of normal children and children with autism
Children's grasp of make-believe transformations was studied. In Experiment 1, children saw an adult enact a pretend change (e.g., sprinkling pretend talcum powder over a toy cat). They indicated the pretend outcome by choosing between a picture depicting no change (e.g., cat without talcum powder on its body) and a picture depicting the pretend change (e.g., cat covered with talcum powder). Older children (M=29 months) chose correctly, but young…
Young children's understanding of pretense expressions of independent agency
Two-year-old children were required to use nonliteral words or actions to complete scenarios in which a doll acted as the agent of a series of make-believe events. An experimenter encoded the doll's imaginary intentions either verbally or through pretend actions. No gender differences were observed, but older 2-year-olds performed reliably better than younger 2-year-olds. In addition, episodes that required children to enact the conclusion to eve…
Deception by young children following noncompliance
When does and ostrich become a bird? The role of typicality in early word comprehension
Which objects and animals are children willing to accept as referents for words they know? To answer this question, the authors assessed early word comprehension using the preferential looking task. Children were shown 2 stimuli side by side (a target and a distractor) and heard the target stimulus named. The target stimulus was either a typical or an atypical exemplar of the named category. It was predicted that children first connect typical ex…
In Cinderella's slippers? Story comprehension from the protagonist's point of view
Research on text comprehension shows that readers construct a model of the situation described in a narrative. A major factor in constructing a situational model is the perspective from which the action of the narrative is imagined. J. B. Black, T. J. Turner, and G. H. Bower (1979) found that adults recall a deictic verb of motion more accurately if it is spatially consistent with the point of view of the main protagonist. Recall is more accurate…
Piaget’s Conception of the Development of Consciousness: An Examination of Two Hypotheses
Checking our sources: The origins of trust in testimony
Les dieux, les ancêtres et les enfants
L'approche orthodoxe du développement cognitif postule que les enfants acquièrent progressivement une conception du monde de plus en plus objective. Or cette idée s'applique mal à l'étude des concepts religieux chez les enfants, car il n'existe pas de mesure évidente qui permette de déterminer ce qui est plus ou moins objectif dans le domaine religieux. Les anthropologues cognitifs se sont donné un programme différent. Ils se sont demandé si le m…
Trust in Testimony: Children's Use of True and False Statements
The extent to which young children monitor and use the truth of assertions to gauge the reliability of subsequent testimony was examined. Three- and 4-year-old children were presented with two informants, an accurate labeler and an inaccurate labeler. They were then invited to learn names for novel objects from these informants. The children correctly monitored and identified the informants on the basis of the truth of their prior labeling. Furth…
Psychology (101 works) · Developmental psychology (73 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (65 works) · Social Psychology (63 works) · Epistemology (34 works) · Social Psychology (32 works) · Cognitive psychology (31 works) · Cognition (20 works) · Philosophy (20 works) · Linguistics (18 works)