Supersense by Hood Bruce

Author:Hood, Bruce [Hood, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Constable Robinson
Published: 2009-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

THE ESSENTIAL CHILD

Children’s essentialist thinking is amazing.17 Before they reach school age, they know that baby joeys raised by goats grow up into adult kangaroos, not adult goats. They know that apple seeds grown in flowerpots become apple trees, not flowers.18 They even know that a light-skinned baby switched at birth with a dark-skinned baby remains the original colour despite being raised by the new family.19 A leaf insect may look more like a leaf than an insect, but four-year-olds know it shares properties with other bugs, not with leaves.20 When they are slightly older, they understand that if an evil scientist takes a raccoon and performs an operation to turn it into a skunk by attaching a furry tail, painting a white line down its back, and putting a bag of foul-smelling stuff between its legs, it is still a raccoon even though it looks like Pepé Le Pew.21 Essential thinking allows children to understand that the leopard literally can’t change its spots. And no one needs to teach children this. It’s part of their intuitive biological understanding.

Children’s essentialism is truly surprising, as pre-schoolers can often be fooled by outward appearances.22 However, once they understand what can and can’t be changed by environment, they are committed essentialists who see core properties everywhere. They think that there is something inside that cannot be changed. They don’t know what it is, and they would be hard-pressed to describe it. When it comes to understanding living things, they really seem to grasp that there is something deep inside that makes animals and plants what they are. It’s a universal beliefs shared by different cultures, suggesting that essentialism is a natural way of viewing the world.

Although children and most adults can’t describe exactly what an essence is, they can tell you where it is, if only indirectly. In one study, children were told about an ancient block of ice that had different animals frozen in it.23 Scientists wanted to determine what the different animals were by doing tests on small samples taken from the things inside the block. Children were asked whether it made a difference where the sample was taken from. By ten years of age, children reasoned like adults that it did not matter where the sample was taken because whatever defines an animal is spread throughout the body. In contrast, four-year-olds, the youngest children in the study, insisted that the true identity of an animal is found in only one spot and not spread out. When questioned further, these children seemed to think that the correct spot to choose was from the centre of the body. What starts out as a very localized notion of essence in young children develops into a belief about something that spreads throughout the body, even though these children never mentioned scientific concepts such as DNA.

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