Whose fault is it?

For 3- to 4- year-olds

First, your child will look at shapes in a few parts of the screen. After that, they will see videos of shape characters interacting. Depending on the condition, either one character will push another to break a cube, or a character will break a cube directly while another shape remains inactive. Following this event, an authority figure will appear to address the situation. Your child won't need to speak or choose anything; we will just be recording where on the screen they look during the silent videos.

How do children understand causal relationships and assign responsibility? Imagine a scenario where one person pushes another, leading to an object breaking, or where one person breaks an object directly while another is simply present. How do children assign fault? Many researchers are interested in whether children naturally trace the responsibility to the initiator, the direct cause, or only to active agents. Our research is aimed at testing how children evaluate responsibility and blame across these different situations.

To do this, we use non-verbal animated shapes to bypass the complexities of language. By recording where your child looks during these events, we can uncover how deeply ingrained and automatic our causal reasoning is. If we find that children naturally focus on the initiator of the chain reaction rather than the direct collider, or how they attribute blame to active versus inactive shapes, this would be a very important finding. It would raise a whole host of questions about the different ways we have for thinking about causation. As one example, it might suggest that sophisticated causal understanding develops early and does not strictly require language. Moreover, the way in which these eye movements relate to the events will reveal something profound about the kind of causal understanding that is involved in making intuitive judgments about responsibility.

10 minutes

You will receive a $5 Amazon gift card (for Amazon.com) for participating in this study. To be eligible for the gift card, your child must be in the age range for this study and your child needs to be visible in the study video. Please also note that you must submit a valid consent statement. Each child is eligible to participate in the study and receive a gift card only once. Gift cards will be sent within one week. Please note that we can only offer Amazon gift cards for US residents, but we still invite everyone to participate. Thanks for your understanding.