Search

Although children often believe an adult's claims, they may have opportunities to check these claims by gathering relevant empirical evidence themselves. Here, we examine whether children seize such opportunities, especially when the claim is counterintuitive. Chinese preschool and elementary schoolchildren were presented with five different-sized Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. Almost all children selected the biggest doll. Half of the children then heard a false, counterintuitive claim (i.e., smallest = heaviest). The remaining children heard a claim confirming their initial intuition (i.e., biggest = heaviest). Children in both age groups typically endorsed the experimenter's claim even when it was counterintuitive. However, during the experimenter's subsequent absence, elementary schoolchildren explored the dolls more if they had received counterintuitive rather than confirming testimony whereas preschool children rarely explored, no matter what testimony they had received. Thus, with increasing age, children seize opportunities to test counterintuitive claims. [Supplemental materials are located at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0000455.supp.]

Deciding whose words to trust profoundly impacts children's knowledge acquisition. In evaluating informants' trustworthiness, children are attentive to their social dominance. Previous studies have shown that children's trust preferences may differ across cultures based on the dominance of the informant: children in Western cultures prefer to trust in testimony from dominant informants, whereas children in Eastern cultures prefer to trust subordinate informants (Bernard et al., 2016; Charafeddine et al., 2019). We aim to investigate the potential cultural difference in the trust preferences of European American children (in the United States) and Chinese children (in China) from informants of varying levels of dominance, using a more refined method to assess children's trust preferences. We propose that different levels of authoritarianism – advocacies to obey authorities – in Western and Eastern cultures may explain the potential difference in children's selective trust. Specifically, as impacted by societal cultures, Chinese parents may possess a higher level of authoritarianism than European American parents and may place a higher emphasis on obedience in their parenting. Consequently, Chinese children may show stronger trust preferences from subordinate informants over dominant informants than European American children. Our research will offer insights into the potential mechanism underlying children's different learning preferences across cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the bestselling Du Lala novel series portraying the career rise and love life of a "foreign corporate white collar woman" in contemporary China. It argues that on top of the books' popular image as career novels that offer useful tips on office politics and desirable Western business practices for young, educated, upwardly mobile urban women, they also inculcate sartorial and consuming practices as a crucial technology to construct an ideal cosmopolitan femininity predicated on material success, cultural and economic capital, and integration with the world. In Lala's process of "striving for success" (fen dou) and her fashioning of a neoliberal, enterprising, and self-responsible self who is determined to achieve success and status often measured in terms of financial gains and commodity ownership, sartorial display, bodily adornment, and material consumption mediated via Western styles/brands figure crucially. Fashion thus functions as a crucial and contested site where global consumer culture, local tradition, and post-socialist party politics intricately intertwine and vie for ascendance, with consequences reverberating both in the geopolitical dimension of modernization and also in the biopolitical dimension of self-construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers' temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals' representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context)., (Copyright © 2011 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.)