Preschoolers' Magical Explanations for Violations of Physical, Social, and Mental Laws

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Preschoolers' MagicalExplanations for Violations ofPhysical, Social, and MentalLawsCheryl A. Browne & Jacqueline D. WoolleyPublished online: 13 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Cheryl A. Browne & Jacqueline D. Woolley (2004) Preschoolers'Magical Explanations for Violations of Physical, Social, and Mental Laws, Journal ofCognition and Development, 5:2, 239-260, DOI: 10.1207/s15327647jcd0502_4

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Preschoolers’ Magical Explanationsfor Violations of Physical, Social,

and Mental Laws

Cheryl A. Browne and Jacqueline D. WoolleyUniversity of Texas at Austin

In 2 experiments we explored young preschoolers’ knowledge of constraints on hu-man action by presenting them with violations of different types of law and askingwhether the violations required magic. In Experiment 1, children responded thatphysical violations required magic more than did social violations. In Experiment 2,violations were presented in pairs and included violations of “mental law.” Again,children’s “magic” responses were higher for physical than for social violations.Older children also differentiated between mental and social violations. It is con-cluded that (a) young preschoolers realize that physical constraint is importantly dif-ferent from social constraint, and (b) children understand that constraints on mentalactivities are also different from those that operate in the social realm; this under-standing develops during the preschool years.

Researchers have long been concerned with children’s understanding of causalmechanisms in the psychological and physical domains (e.g., Gelman, Coley, &Gottfried, 1994; Shultz, 1982). Although most of this research has focused onchildren’s conceptions of why things happen (e.g., Berzonsky, 1971; Metz,1991), equally important is the understanding of why some things do not, orcannot, happen in the two domains. For example, do children know that the prin-ciples preventing rocks from floating in water differ in important ways fromthose preventing boys from wearing dresses? Understanding the basic differ-ences between social and physical constraint is fundamental to peoples’ knowl-edge of the basic regularities of the world (e.g., Kalish, 1998; Komatsu &Galotti, 1986). In addition, as human action is constrained by both social and

JOURNAL OF COGNITION AND DEVELOPMENT, 5(2), 239–260Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Cheryl A. Browne or Jacqueline D. Woolley, The Universityof Texas at Austin, Department of Psychology, 1 University Station A8000, Austin, TX 78712–0187.E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

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physical laws, understanding how the two types of law differ is integral to under-standing the causal bases of human behavior.

Much of the research on children’s understanding of social versus physical lawshas focused on the laws’ origins (natural vs. determined by consensus). By 6 to 8years of age, children seem to have some understanding that social but not physicallaws can be changed by consensus, and this understanding increases with age (e.g.,Komatsu & Galotti, 1986; Nicholls & Thorkildsen, 1988). An arguably more basicdistinction between the two types of law involves the possibility of violating each.In most research addressing this question children have straightforwardly beenasked whether certain laws in each domain can be violated. For example, Nichollsand Thorkildsen asked 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds whether different types of regulari-ties, including social conventions and physical laws, could be otherwise (e.g.,“Could [a stone] ever not fall down if you let it go?” “Could an A ever be written[differently]?”). Children treated physical, but not social, regularities as inviolableand unvarying across time and space. Also, Levy, Taylor, and Gelman (1995)asked 4- and 8-year-olds and adults (among other questions) whether certain phys-ical and social violations are possible; after asking whether they were familiar witha given rule or regularity (e.g., “What do people eat ice cream with—a spoon ortheir fingers?”), the experimenter asked whether a situation violating the regularitywas also possible (“Can people also eat ice cream with their fingers?”). The oldergroups were more flexible in allowing for violations of social laws than physicallaws. The 4-year-olds, however, were inflexible for both physical and social laws.Thus, from this research it appears that children do not distinguish between socialand physical laws until about 6 years of age.

More recently, however, Kalish (1998) argued that previous research did not re-ally address children’s understanding of the different types of constraint involvedin social versus physical laws, because children were simply asked whether socialand physical laws can be violated, but were not asked about the types of forces pre-venting or permitting the violations. Do children know, for example, that peopleconform to social laws because of psychological factors or reasons (e.g., becausethey decide to) but conform to physical laws because of physical causes (e.g., grav-ity)?1 Thus, Kalish aligned the study of children’s ability to distinguish betweensocial and physical laws more closely with the basic issue of children’s explana-tions for human action (and inaction) by investigating children’s understanding ofthe reasons behind people’s conformity to laws.

In one experiment, Kalish (1998) asked 3- and 4-year-olds whether childrencould perform certain actions—some were socially proscribed, whereas otherswere physically impossible—and solicited explanations. Consistent with the find-ings discussed previously, children said that people “can’t” perform actions that vi-

240 BROWNE AND WOOLLEY

1See Buss (1978) for theoretical discussions on the difference between reasons and causes in causalattribution.

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olate social or physical laws. However, they justified their answers for these deni-als differently for the two types of action; actions that violated physical lawstended to evoke physical explanations, whereas social violations tended to evokepsychological explanations, particularly for the 4-year-olds. In a second experi-ment children were told that the characters actually intended to violate the laws,and instead of saying whether the character could perform the action, participantswere asked to predict whether the children actually would perform the action.Kalish reasoned that if participants understood the voluntary versus automatic na-ture of conformity to social and physical laws (respectively), they would realizethat whereas social laws can be violated given the intention to do so, physical lawscannot be violated, regardless of one’s intention to violate them. Indeed, the olderpreschoolers predicted social violations more than physical violations. The3-year-olds, however, tended not to predict violations of any kind. In a third experi-ment it was stated that the characters in the stories were ignorant about the lawsthey intended to violate. Again, 4-year-olds predicted social but not physical viola-tions, whereas 3-year-olds tended to say that neither type of action would occur.

These findings are compelling because, whereas previous research found thatchildren younger than approximately 6 years conflate social and physical laws,Kalish’s (1998) research suggests that children as young as 4 years of age distin-guish between physical and social laws. However, a few limitations in Kalish’sstudies point to the need for more research on this topic using different methods.First, the 3-year-olds’ responses are difficult to interpret. In Kalish’s first experi-ment participants were required to provide explanations for why people can’t dothings. Young children are notorious for having trouble with open-ended “why”questions (e.g., Bullock, 1984; Schult & Wellman, 1997); indeed, for one type ofstory (involving gender roles) 3-year-olds gave no codable justifications, and onlyabout half of this age group’s justifications for the other stories were codable as ei-ther psychological (“reason”) or physical (“cause”). In the second experiment,3-year-olds tended to deny that violations of either type would occur, perhaps be-cause (as discussed by the author) they may have felt uncomfortable predictingthat the characters would be “naughty” and may have responded solely on that ba-sis. The third experiment avoided this problem (as the characters were said to beunaware of the laws); however, the solution generated a different problem, alsonoted by Kalish: Children of this age often do not understand that people can haveknowledge states that differ from their own (e.g., Wellman, 1990). Therefore,3-year-olds’ uniformly negative predictions in this experiment may have been dueto a failure to comprehend fully that the story characters were ignorant of the laws.

We still, then, do not have a clear picture of the developmental trajectory of pre-school-age children’s understanding of the difference between physical and socialconstraint. Considering the difficulties encountered in testing 3-year-olds, re-search addressing this issue should not require (a) verbal justifications of con-straints, (b) an understanding of mental states different from one’s own, or (c) pre-

PRESCHOOLERS’ EXPLANATIONS 241

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dictions about whether a child will in fact violate laws.2 The purpose of our studiesis to investigate children’s understanding of the causal bases of social and physicallaws using methods that take into account young preschoolers’ verbal and concep-tual limitations. To take on this task, we chose to elicit a simple judgment fromchildren that would essentially act as a proxy to their verbalization of explanatoryprinciples; we elicited preschoolers’ judgments of the involvement of magic in so-cial and physical violations.

Children appear to “have access both to normal, everyday mechanisms and toextraordinary, magical ones to make sense of their experiences” (Rosengren,Kalish, Hickling, & Gelman, 1994, p. 80), and it is well documented that when pre-schoolers are presented with occurrences both that are unexpected and that theycannot explain using their repertoire of ordinary causal mechanisms, they consis-tently invoke magic as an explanatory principle. For example, Phelps and Woolley(1994) presented 3- to 8-year-olds with several events that seemed to violate physi-cal constraints but could be explained using basic physical principles (i.e., theywere not simply illusions). Children were asked how each event had happened andwhether the event was magic or not magic. The only significant predictor of chil-dren’s magic judgments was whether they possessed an explanation for the event.In a related experiment (Chandler & Lalonde, 1994), 3- to 5-year-olds witnessedapparent violations of object permanence. Initially, two thirds of the children spon-taneously explained the event as the result of magic. However, after being given anopportunity to examine the apparatus and thus to discover the physical mechanismbehind the trick, all except two children abandoned their former magical explana-tions. Again, the use of magic as an explanation clearly indicated an initial inabil-ity to explain with normal causal principles an event which seemed to violate theway the physical world normally works. It is important to note that children’s use


2In addition, it seems that the methods employed in Kalish’s (1998) studies may not have quite cap-tured participants’ understanding of the fundamental distinction between the two types of law. For ex-ample, in the first experiment the ability to distinguish between social and physical laws wasoperationalized as giving causes for physical constraint and reasons for social constraint. That olderchildren did this is evidence for their understanding of the distinction. However, a possible problem isin the interpretation of some of the responses; some of the responses that were coded as reasons orcauses did not include mention of either physical or psychological forces. For example, “explicit state-ments of possibility/impossibility” (p. 709) were among responses that counted as causes. But sayingthat an action is “impossible” does not necessarily entail the understanding of the kind of forces pre-venting the action from occurring; the statement could simply indicate the knowledge that some kind ofstrong forces—physical or psychological or indeterminate—are acting against the probability of the ac-tion. Indeed, psychological as well as physical forces do prevent actions from occurring; for example,many people would consider it to be impossible to muster the courage to bungee jump, but they wouldbe referring to fear as the force acting against the action, not a suspension of gravity. In addition, chil-dren’s references to the possible consequences of performing the action were counted as reasons. How-ever, even if children understand physical constraint, they may talk about the consequences of trying toviolate physical laws (e.g., “You can’t walk through a wall because it would hurt”).

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of magic to explain an occurrence specifically relates to whether it (a) violates chil-dren’s notions of the way the world works and (b) cannot be explained by childrenusing the ordinary causal principles in their repertoire. It is not limited to the do-main of physical causality, and it does not map directly onto an expected–unex-pected distinction. Evidence that magic is not limited to the domain of physicalcausality includes that children use magic to explain violations of “mental–physi-cal” causality such as a desire to make something happen resulting in it actuallyhappening (Woolley, Phelps, Davis, & Mandell, 1999). Evidence that magic doesnot map onto an expected–unexpected distinction includes the finding that chil-dren do not say that unexpected, but explicable, events are magic (Harris, 1994).For preschoolers, magic serves as a default explanation to be used when an anoma-lous event appears to have no ordinary explanation.

It is this role played by children’s conception of magic (as a marker for whetherthey can explain an unexpected event using ordinary causal principles) that makesit particularly suitable for testing their ability to distinguish between social andphysical laws. One of the clearest distinctions between the two types of law in-volves the ability to explain an apparent violation of each type. There is no causalsequence of mental or physical causality that could lead to a violation of a physicallaw, and, if it were to happen, there would be no explanation within our knowledgeof the causal principles of the world—either psychological or physical—to ac-count for the occurrence. On the other hand, violations of social laws can easily beexplained using ordinary principles of psychological causality (e.g., a boy wantedto wear a dress and believed it would be worth the consequences). Thus, in ourstudies we assessed preschoolers’ understanding of this distinction by presentingviolations of social and physical laws (e.g., taking a bath with one’s clothes on,floating in the air), eliciting judgments of whether the event was the result ofmagic, and comparing the incidence of magical explanation for the two types oflaw. We reasoned that if children understand that violations of social laws differfrom physical violations in that they can be explained (via psychological forcessuch as desire and intention), they should use magic more to explain physical vio-lations. If on the other hand they do not make this distinction—if they think thatboth types of violation can be explained with mental states, or, conversely, if theythink mental states are not a sufficient explanation for either type of violation—they should use magic equally to explain both types of violation.

EXPERIMENT 1

The basic design of this experiment was similar to that used by Kalish (1998, Ex-periment 2) and by Schult and Wellman (1997, Experiment 2). As in Kalish, chil-dren were presented with stories in which a child wants to violate either a sociallaw or a physical law (e.g., take a bath with his shoes on, walk through a wall) and


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were asked to predict whether the child would really violate the law. The experi-ment deviated from those just mentioned, however, in that children were then toldand shown that the child in the story did in fact violate the law and were required todecide whether this violation was magic.

Participants were young 3-year-olds, older 3-year-olds, and young 4-year-olds.In related past studies, 3-year-olds have generally been treated as a group, with themean age of 3 years 6 months (3;6) or older (e.g., Schult & Wellman, 1997). Thus,we know little about young 3-year-olds and what development might occur be-tween 3;0 and 4;0. In this experiment, two 3-year-old age groups (younger andolder), as well as a group of 4-year-olds with approximately the same size range asthe other groups, were included to allow for a more precise account of how andwhen changes occur in children’s understanding of physical and social causality.

Method

Participants. Forty-five preschoolers (23 girls and 22 boys) participated. Fif-teen were younger 3-year-olds (M = 3;4, range = 3;2–3;5), 15 were older3-year-olds (M = 3;10, range = 3;8–4;0), and 15 were young 4-year-olds (M = 4;4,range = 4;1–4;6). Names were obtained from birth records kept on file at a univer-sity research laboratory, and children were recruited through letter and telephonecontact with the parents. Most participants were White and middle class, but sev-eral ethnic groups were represented.

Stimuli and design. Nine scenarios were shown to each child. Three scenar-ios portrayed children who wanted to do something physically impossible (physi-cal stories), three were about children who wanted to do something socially pro-hibited (social stories), and three portrayed children who wanted to do somethingthat did not violate any law (control stories). It was important that the children beas unlikely to have seen violations of the social stories as of the physical stories sothat children’s answers would reflect their understanding of whether violationswere possible and not simply their experience with the particular violations pre-sented. Therefore, the three social stories and two of the physical stories wereadapted from stories pretested by Kalish (1998); he found that 3- and 4-year-oldswere equally unlikely to have seen the social as the physical violations. One physi-cal story (“wall”) was adapted from Schult and Wellman (1997). The control sto-ries were included for two reasons. First, because in the violation stories childrenwere asked to predict whether the child would perform the desired action, afterwhich they were always told that the child did perform the action, we were con-cerned that children would quickly learn that the outcome in all the stories was thesame. Therefore, we included three stories in which the outcome was different—the child did not perform the desired action. Second, as these stories did not in-


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volve violations of laws of any kind, they provided a control with which to com-pare children’s predictions about the outcome in the violation stories.

Each story was accompanied by two illustrations. The first illustration depictedthe child wanting to perform an action (e.g., looking at a plate of candy, standingnext to a wall). The second illustration depicted the outcome (e.g., a child eating aplate of candy for dinner, a child walking through a wall). The illustrations werephotographs that were altered using commercially available image-manipulationsoftware. They were printed on 8.5 in. × 11 in. paper, placed back to back, and lam-inated. See Figure 1 for the photographs used in this study.

The control stories were always presented in Positions 2, 5, and 8. Twenty dif-ferent orders of the remaining six stories were generated, and each participant wasrandomly assigned to 1 of the 20 orders.


FIGURE 1 Photographs/stories used in Experiment 1.

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Procedure. Children were tested individually in a university laboratory. Pre-ceding the presentation of the test stimuli, children received a series of warm-uptasks. The warm-up tasks were designed for three reasons: (a) to familiarize childrenwith the experimenter and the surroundings, (b) to ensure that children understoodthe concept of “not X,” as they would be required to choose between magic and notmagic in the test questions3, and (c) to make explicit that both magic and not magicwere potentially appropriate responses. To ensure that children could answer “notX,” children were first shown a red crayon and were asked, “Tell me about thiscrayon. Is it red,or is itnot red?”Then theywereasked thesamequestionaboutabluecrayon. To make it clear that both magic and not magic responses were valued, chil-dren were presented with a series of events involving potential violations of differenttypes of law. The experimenter asked the children, “Let’s say I wanted to walk on theceiling.WouldIneedmagic todothat,orcouldIdo itwithoutmagic?”Childrenwerethen asked three questions about themselves: whether they would need magic to (a)walkacross thestreet, (b) singaChristmassongatabirthdayparty, and(c)makeacatappear suddenly just by thinking about it. When children answered a warm-up ques-tioncorrectly theexperimenter said, “That’s right! [Correct answer repeated]”; if thechildren answered incorrectly the experimenter responded, “Actually, [correct an-swer stated]” and the question was repeated. If the children did not answer, the ques-tion was simply repeated until the children answered correctly.

The experimenter then put two boxes on the table, equidistant from the chil-dren, and said, “Okay, now I’ll tell you some stories and show you some neat pic-tures. Some of the stories are magic and some are not magic. The magic stories goin this box [experimenter pointed to one box], and the stories that are not magic goin this box [experimenter pointed to the second box].” Boxes were used to makethe task more concrete and interesting for the young children. This procedure hasproven to be effective in other studies in which preschool-aged children wereasked to make similar dichotomized decisions about several different stimuli (e.g.,Lillard & Sobel, 1999).

Children were then told the first part of the story, in which the character wants toperform an action, as the first picture was shown. They were then asked a predic-tion question (e.g., “Do you think he will really turn into a fish, or will he only beable to pretend?”). As in Kalish’s studies (1998, Experiments 2 and 3), the pretendchoice was given to lessen the possible effects of a yes versus no response bias. Theexperimenter then read the outcome of the story and showed the second picture(e.g., “Actually, he really did turn into a fish. See? There he is, living in the wa-ter.”). Finally, for the physical and social stories the magic question was asked andchildren were reminded of which box was which: “What do you think about that?Do you think it was magic, or was it not magic? Remember, the magic stories go in


3In pilot tests we asked whether the violations were magic or silly; however, some children seemed to in-terpret silly as meaning not real (i.e., “Is the violation real magic or is this just a silly, made-up picture?”).

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this box, and the not magic stories go in this box.” Children then placed the picturein one of the boxes. Order of the choices magic and not magic alternated acrossstories for each participant. For the control stories, children were told that the char-acter did not perform the action (e.g., “Actually, she didn’t eat the apple after din-ner. She decided she was too full to eat anything else.”). Children were not askedthe magic question after the control stories.

Results

Responses to warm-up questions. For the warm-up questions, includingwhether a crayon was red or not red, and whether magic would be involved if theexperimenter walked on the ceiling or sang Christmas songs at a birthday party, atno age was children’s performance perfect, but it increased with age. The mean forthe youngest children (out of 6) was 3.8. For the older 3-year-olds, the mean was4.3. Finally, the oldest group’s mean was 5.19. Correlations revealed that for noage group did performance on the warm-up questions predict performance on themain question (magic or not) in the main task (ps > .05).

Responses to prediction questions. For the prediction questions (“Doyou think he will really [perform the desired action] or will he only be able to pre-tend?”), each child was given a score (0 to 3) for each story type (physical, social,and control) reflecting the number of stories of that type for which the child said“really.”4 As shown in Table 1, children seemed biased to say “pretend” (M = .79).A 3 (age group) × 3 (story type: physical, social, and control) analysis of variance(ANOVA) revealed that there was no main effect for age group or story type on thenumber of really predictions. However, there was a significant interaction of storytype and age group, F(4, 80) = 3.52, p < .05.

To investigate this interaction we performed separate one-way ANOVAs oneach age group to test for simple main effects of story type. Young 4-year-oldswere the only group for whom story type significantly affected predictions, F(2,28) = 5.41, ps < .05; however, the effect of story type on young 3-year-olds’predic-tions approached significance, F(2, 24) = 3.17, p = .06. Post hoc tests revealed thatyoung 4-year-olds were significantly more likely to predict that the story characterwould perform the desired action for the control stories (i.e., when the action didnot violate any law) than for either the social stories, F(1, 14) = 4.85, p < .05, or thephysical stories, F(1, 14) = 10.84, p < .01. Young 3-year-olds, on the other hand,were less likely to say that the story character would perform the desired action forthe control stories than for the physical stories, F(1, 12) = 7.50, p < .05. No agegroup distinguished between social and physical stories in their predictions.


4Tests of significance using a general linear model showed that the three stories within each type didnot differ from each other in terms of predictions or responses to the magic question; therefore, the sto-ries of each type were considered together.

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Magic judgments. For the physical and social stories (but not control sto-ries), children were told that the story character performed the desired action andwere asked whether the outcome was magic or not magic. Each participant wasgiven a score of 0 to 3 for each story type (physical and social) based on the numberof magic responses. A 3 (age group) × 2 (story type) ANOVA revealed that chil-dren were significantly more likely to say that magic was involved in violations ofphysical laws (M = 2.04) than in violations of social laws (M = 1.18 ), F(1, 42) =31.5, p < .001, as shown in Table 2. There was no effect of age on total number ofmagic responses, and there was no significant interaction between age and storytype. Although the Age × Story Type interaction was not significant, the pattern ofeach age group’s magic responses across story type suggested that the ages mightdiffer in the extent to which they distinguished between social and physical viola-tions. One-way ANOVAs performed on each age group revealed that story typehad a significant effect on magic judgments for young 4-year-olds, F(1, 14) =16.43, p < .01, and older 3-year-olds, F(1, 14) = 16.73, p < .01, but not for young3-year-olds. Children in the older age groups were more likely to say “magic” inresponse to physical violations than in response to social violations.

To examine individual patterns of responses, four patterns were identified. Thecorrect pattern was defined as choosing magic for two or three physical stories and


TABLE 1Experiment 1: Means and Standard Deviations for Really Responses

(Out of Three) for the Prediction Question

Age Group

Young 3-Year-Olds Older 3-Year-Olds Young 4-Year-Olds

Story Type M SD M SD M SD

Social 0.60 0.83 0.67 0.98 1.00 1.00Physical 0.73 0.96 0.67 1.11 0.80 0.94Control 0.36 0.77 0.80 1.15 1.50 1.35

TABLE 2Experiment 1: Means and Standard Deviations for Magic Responses

(Out of Three)

Age Group

Young 3-Year-Olds Older 3-Year-Olds Young 4-Year-Olds

Story Type M SD M SD M SD

Physical 1.87 1.13 1.93 1.10 2.33 0.90Social 1.40 1.24 1.00 1.00 1.13 1.13

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not magic for two or three social stories. Two patterns were defined as magic ori-ented (two or three magic responses for each story type) and nonmagic oriented(two or three not magic responses for each story type). The fourth pattern was thereverse of the correct pattern: two or three magic responses for the social storiesand two or three nonmagic responses for the physical stories. As shown in Table 3,out of 15 children in each age group, 10 young 4-year-olds, 5 older 3-year-olds,and 5 younger 3-year-olds fit the “correct” pattern. Children in the youngest agegroup were as likely to be correct as they were to be either magic oriented ornonmagic oriented, indicating that they were not systematically altering theirmagic judgments as a function of story type. The older children were less likely tofit one of these oriented patterns.

Prediction/magic patterns. In this experiment, two different methods wereused to assess children’s understanding of the distinction between social and phys-ical laws. Children predicted whether characters would perform desired actionsthat violated the two types of law, and they judged whether these violations, whenthey occurred, were magic or not magic. Researchers who have used the predictionquestion in the past have interpreted a child’s prediction of a character’s failure toperform a desired action (in this case, pretend) to indicate an understanding thatthe action is impossible and not under the character’s voluntary control (Kalish,1998; Schult & Wellman, 1997). In this experiment, magic responses were taken toindicate this understanding. Did these two responses tend to converge? That is,when children predicted that a character would be able only to pretend to perform adesired action, did they tend to say that it was magic when told that the violationactually occurred? To address this question, each child was given a score from 0 to6 indicating the number of stories for which the child said an expected combina-tion of responses for the prediction and magic questions. An expected combinationfor a story was considered to be either (a) pretend and magic or (b) really and notmagic. The other two possible combinations (really and magic or pretend and notmagic) were considered to be unexpected combinations. See Table 4 for the num-ber of individuals receiving each score per age group. For both younger and older


TABLE 3Experiment 1: Numbers of Children in Each Category

for the “Magic” Question

Category

Age Group CorrectMagic

OrientedNonmagicOriented Reverse

Young 3 5 5 5 0Older 3 5 6 2 2Young 4 10 3 2 0

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3-year-olds, the mean number of stories for which expected combinations weregiven was about half of the total number of stories (M = 2.93 and 2.87, respec-tively). For the young 4-year-olds, the mean was slightly higher (3.87). Althoughthe difference between 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds approaches significance, F(1,43) = 3.51, p = .07, even for these oldest children the mean does not differ signifi-cantly from that expected from chance, t(14) = 1.86, p = .08. Thus, although pre-dictions and magic judgments were meant to measure the same phenomenon,when considered separately only magic judgments indicated that children distin-guished between social and physical laws, and within individuals the two measuresdid not correspond with each other.

Discussion

When children were asked whether violations of each type of law required magic,both older 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds claimed that magic was responsible forphysical violations to a greater extent than for social violations. Data from themagic question therefore corroborate previous research (Kalish, 1998) suggestingthat 4-year-olds distinguish between the two types of law, using different and argu-ably more valid methods. In addition, they show that even younger children (older3-year-olds) make the distinction in their judgments about whether violations ofeach type of law require magic.

However, participants in all three age groups failed to distinguish between thetwo types of violation in their predictions of whether the story characters wouldperform the violations. Although this is consistent with our argument that chil-dren’s predictions of violating laws generally underestimates their ability to distin-guish between the two types of law, it is also possible that our design might havemade it particularly difficult for children to make differential predictions for thetwo types of violation. Because we told children the outcomes of the stories afterthey made the predictions, they may have learned after a few stories that in thesestories physical laws will be violated, even if magic must be evoked to explain theviolation. This could account for our nonreplication of Kalish’s finding that4-year-olds predicted social violations more than physical violations.


TABLE 4Experiment 1: Numbers of Expected Combinations of Really and Magic

Number of Expected Combinations

Age group 0 1 2 3 4 5 6

Young 3 3 2 3 2 2 2 1Older 3 2 1 3 2 1 4 2Young 4 1 1 2 2 4 4 1

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Although the results from the magic question seem relatively straightforward, afew alternate interpretations remain. One of these concerns what exactly can be in-ferred from the fact that older 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds evoked magic more of-ten for physical than for social violations. Earlier, we presented evidence that chil-dren use magic for anomalous events that cannot be explained using ordinarycausal principles. However, it is still possible that factors other than explainabilityaffected children’s magic judgments in the present experiment. That is, there mayhave been something about the particular physical violations used in this experi-ment that children associated with magic, independent of whether they believedthat these violations could be explained using ordinary causal principles. For ex-ample, children may associate “walking through a wall” and “turning into a fish”with supernatural creatures such as ghosts and mermaids, and they may havejudged these events to be magic based on these associations.

Another alternate interpretation concerns the fact that the youngest children in-voked magic for the two types of violation to an approximately equal extent. Al-though this suggests they did not distinguish between physical and social viola-tions, it is possible that the method of employing the dichotomous magic/notmagic choice for each story was not optimal for accessing their understanding ofthe distinction. Recall that these children tended to become stuck in a response setof saying either “magic” or “not magic” for most of the trials, and they did notseem to easily move back and forth between the two responses.

EXPERIMENT 2

Experiment 2 was designed primarily to address these alternate interpretationswhile using the same paradigm as in Experiment 1 (presenting violations of differ-ent types of law and eliciting magic judgments). First, we wished to ensure that thetendency of the 4-year-olds and older 3-year-olds in Experiment 1 to say “magic”more for the physical than for the social violations was not specific to the particularviolations used in the experiment. Therefore, a different set of social and physicallaws was presented in Experiment 2. Second, we altered the procedure so that chil-dren did not have to choose between magic and not magic for every violation;rather, they were presented with pairs of violations and were asked to point to theone that required magic. We hoped that this change would provide a better test ofwhether children distinguish between the two types of law, as it would avoid theproblem of them showing a magic or not magic response bias.

An additional purpose of Experiment 2 was to extend the scope of the first ex-periment to a third type of law—laws about the way people’s minds work (mentallaw). Do children understand that, for example, whereas one can choose to violatesocial laws, one cannot choose to violate mental laws, such as choosing to knowsomething if one does not have access to the information, or choosing to cause


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physical changes directly with one’s mind? And, if they are told that such eventsoccurred, do they think these violations can be explained by ordinary principlesabout the way the mind works, or must they be explained by special, magicalforces? There is evidence that preschoolers understand some aspects of mentallaw; for example, by 3 or 4 years of age, children understand that thinking alonecannot bring about changes in reality (Estes, Wellman, & Woolley, 1989; Woolley& Phelps, 1994; Woolley & Wellman, 1993) and that wishing is a magical, not anordinary, process (Johnson & Harris, 1994, Experiment 2; Woolley et al., 1999).However, it is unknown whether children understand mental law to be more likesocial law in that one can choose to violate it, or more like physical law in that vio-lating it requires magic. Given that psychological laws apply to people and not tothings, it seemed conceivable that young children might initially treat violations ofthem more similarly to social law violations than to physical law violations.

Finally, in Experiment 2 we also included pairs of stories in which both viola-tions were physical but one had an explanation attached. These explanations weremeant to sound like ordinary explanations but in fact employed mechanisms thatdo not exist (e.g., “He stayed dry in the water because he put trone on himself”). Itwas reasoned that if children invoke magic simply when they have no readily avail-able explanation for an event, then, given the choice between a physical violationwith an explanation and one without an explanation, they will choose the latter asthe one that required magic.

Method

Participants. Sixty-one preschoolers (32 girls and 29 boys) participated.Nineteen were younger 3-year-olds (M = 3;2, range = 3;0–3;5), 21 were older3-year-olds (M = 3;9, range = 3;6–3;11), and 21 were young 4-year-olds (M = 4;3,range = 4;0–4;6). Names were obtained from birth records kept on file at a univer-sity research laboratory, and children were recruited through letter and telephonecontact with the parents. Most participants were White and middle class, but sev-eral ethnic groups were represented.

Stimuli and design. Six pairs of illustrated stories telling about children vi-olating various kinds of law were presented to each child. Two of the pairs con-sisted of a social violation and a physical violation (e.g., a boy eating dog food anda boy floating in the air), two consisted of a social violation and a mental violation(e.g., a boy wearing pajamas to the grocery store and a girl knowing what someonehad eaten for breakfast by just looking at him), and the remaining two pairs con-sisted of two physical violations, one with an explanation attached and one with noexplanation (e.g., a boy fitting into a small box “because [explanation]” vs. a boywalking on the ceiling). The explanations were designed to sound like actual ex-planations, but in reality were nonmeaningful. For example, in one story a boy


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swam in a pool without getting wet “because he put trone on himself,” and in an-other a boy walked on the ceiling “because he had glicks on his feet.” All violationswere informally pretested with children who did not participate in the experimentto make sure children were as unlikely to have experienced the social violations asthe physical and mental violations. (As discussed later, a more formal test is in-cluded in the experiment itself.) As shown in Figure 2, each story was accompa-nied by a drawing that depicted a child performing an action (e.g., eating dinnerunder the table, swimming in a pool without getting wet).


FIGURE 2 Drawings/stories used in Experiment 2.

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Each participant was randomly assigned to 1 of 16 different versions of the ex-periment, which were generated in the following ways to randomize or counterbal-ance several factors. First, each version was composed of two each of the three dif-ferent types of comparisons (i.e., social vs. physical, social vs. mental, physical vs.physical with explanation). The order in which these comparison types occurredwas randomized across versions. Within each type of comparison in each version,the story type order was opposite for the two trials of that comparison type. For ex-ample, the comparison type of social versus physical appeared twice in each ver-sion—one in which the social story was first, and one in which the physical storywas first. Second, specific stories were randomly assigned to the versions, with therestriction that each story was presented first (in the pair) half the time, and secondhalf the time. And third, within the physical versus physical-with-explanationpairs, each physical story had an explanation attached half the time.

Children were tested individually in a university laboratory. Preceding the pre-sentation of the test stimuli, children participated in a warm-up session designed tofamiliarize them with the experimenter, the surroundings, and the concept of magicas being a means to do something that cannot be done ordinarily. After a brief intro-duction, the experimenter said, “Let’s say I wanted to turn myself into a bird, so Icould fly around and make a nest. Would I need magic to do that, or could I do it justbecause I wanted to?” After children responded, the experimenter said, “That’sright/Actually I’d need magic to do that, ‘cause I can’t turn myself into a bird just be-cause I want to.” Children were then asked whether the experimenter could stick hertongue out just because she wanted to, or if she’d need magic to do it. After childrenresponded the experimenter replied, “That’s right/Actually, I wouldn’t need magicto do that. I could do it just because I wanted to.” Children were then shown drawingsofagirl turning intoabirdandaboystickingouthis tongueandwereasked topoint tothe one that needed magic for the pictured action to occur. Again, feedback wasgiven. Next, participants were told about a girl who wore purple clothes as well asabout a boy who turned his skin purple, and were shown pictures of each. Again, theywere asked which one needed magic, and feedback was given.

On the test trials, for each comparison, children were first asked about the rule orlaw involved in both violations, as well as whether they had ever seen anyone violatethe laws.Forexample, theywereasked,“Wheredopeoplewalk?Dotheywalkon theceiling or do they walk on the floor?” or “Where do people eat? At the table or underthe table?” The order of the correct answer and the other response was counterbal-anced, and no feedback was given at this time. The experimenter then asked whetherthey had ever seen the law violated (“Have you ever seen anyone walk on the ceil-ing?” “Have you ever seen anyone eat under the table?”). If children said yes, the ex-perimenter asked, “Who have you seen do that?” If the response involved a fictionalcharacterorchildren’s imagination, theywereasked,“Whatabout in real life? In reallife, [question was repeated]?” The experimenter then gave feedback about the rule(“That’s right/Actually people can’t walk on the ceiling” or “That’s right. People


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can’t eat on the floor”). The pictures were then placed on the table and the experi-menter showed how the pictures depicted the situations. For example, the experi-menter said, “This boy walked on the ceiling. See? There he is, walking on the ceil-ing. And this boy ate his dinner under the table. See? There he is eating his dinnerunder the table.” To be sure children remembered which story–picture was which,the experimenter asked them to point to the picture that corresponded to each storyand gave them feedback. Finally, participants were asked the test question: “One ofthem needed magic to do what they did, and the other one didn’t need any magic.Which one needed magic to do what they did? Point to the one that needed magic.”While asking this question, the experimenter was careful to look directly at the chil-drenandnotateitherof thepictures.Nofeedbackwasgivenfor the testquestion.

Results and Discussion

For the rule questions (e.g., “Where do people eat? Do they eat under the table, or dothey eat at the table?”), 97% of children responded correctly for the social rules, 90%for the physical rules, and 77% for the mental rules. A one-way ANOVA revealedthat there were no age differences in the extent to which children were correct. In re-gard to the responses to the question about whether participants had ever experi-enced violations of the rules (e.g., “Have you ever seen anyone turn on the TV by justthinking about it?”), this question was included to ensure that any tendencies to saythat the physical and mental violations required magic were not based on childrenhaving actually experienced (or perceiving to have experienced) the social viola-tions more than the other types. In fact, children reported having experienced thephysical and social violations to an equal extent: 14% and 13% of responses to thisquestion for the physical and social violations (respectively) were affirmative. Thepercentage of affirmative responses to this question for the mental violations was23%. For all three types of violation, affirmative responses were significantly fewerthan would be expected by chance (ts < 6.5, ps < .001). As children were more likelyto report having seen the mental than the social violations (t = 2.5, p < .05) and wereequally likely to report having seen the social and physical violations, any tendencyfor children to say that the mental and physical violations (vs. the social ones) weremagic would most likely reflect their understanding of different types of constraint,and not their actual (or perceived) experience with rule violations.

Regarding the magic question (“Which one needed magic to do what they did?Point to the one that needed magic”), each child received a score from 0 to 2, indi-cating how many times the child chose the correct violation, for each type of com-parison. Correct responses were the physical violation for the social–physicalcomparisons, the mental violation for the social–mental comparisons, and thephysical story without explanation for the physical/physical-with-explanationcomparisons. One-way ANOVAs were performed for each trial type, with age asthe between-subject factor. Each comparison type will be considered separately.


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For the physical–social comparisons, there was no main effect for age. As shownin Table 5, the group as a whole (M = 1.61), as well as each age group separately (Mfor young 3 = 1.35; M for older 3 = 1.67; M for young 4 = 1.76), chose the physical vi-olation at a rate greater than that expected by chance, with chance considered to be 1out of 2 (ts > 2.9, ps < .01; see Table 5). Thus, these results corroborate those of Ex-periment1andextend themtoevenyoungerchildren (young3-year-olds).Althoughthe means for all three age groups were higher than would be expected by chance, asshown in Table 5, the number of children who chose the physical picture for both so-cial–physical comparisons clearly increases with age (see Table 6). Seventeen(81%) of the young 4-year-olds were correct on both social/physical items, as were13 (62%) of the older 3-year-olds, and only 7 (37%) of the young 3-year-olds.

For the social–mental comparisons, again there was no effect for age, and thegroup as a whole chose the mental violation at a rate greater than that of chance (t =5.4, p < .01). When analyzed separately, however, the ages look different; theyoung 3-year-olds’ responses did not differ from those of chance, whereas those ofthe two older groups did (ts > 3.6, ps < .01). As shown in Table 6, the individualpatterns of responses are in line with these findings: Whereas 13 (68%) of the older3-year-olds and 13 (62%) of the 21 young 4-year-olds chose the mental violationfor both trials of this type, only 8 (42%) of the younger 3-year-olds did so.


TABLE 5Experiment 2: Means and Standard Deviations for Correct Responses

(Out of Two)

Age Group

Comparison Young 3 Older 3 Young 4

Social–physical 1.35 0.49 1.67 0.48 1.76 0.54Social–mental 1.24 0.66 1.57 0.51 1.62 0.50Explanation–none 1.06 0.66 0.95 0.74 1.19 0.68

TABLE 6Experiment 2: Numbers Correct on Neither, One, or Both of the Trials

Story Type Pairing

Social–Physical Social–Mental Physical–Explanation

Age 0 1 2 0 1 2 0 1 2

Young 3a 0 12 7 0 11 8 3 10 6Older 3b 0 6 13 0 8 13 9 9 3Young 4c 1 3 17 0 8 13 3 10 8

an = 19. bn = 21. cn = 21.

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Recall that one purpose of the social–mental comparisons was to ascertainwhether children simply associated violations of physical law with magic orwhether they understood that any law that was impossible to violate would requiremagic. The other purpose was to see whether children’s responses to violations ofpsychological laws were more similar to violations of social laws or to violationsof physical laws. As the two oldest age groups in this experiment judged the viola-tions of mental laws to require magic, it seems likely that their magic responses tothe physical violations (in Experiments 1 and 2) were based on impossibility andnot simply association. It is not surprising that the youngest group did not distin-guish between the mental and the social violations, as 3-year-olds have beenshown to have difficulty with some of the concepts involved, particularly the ideathat one cannot know something unless one has specific access to the information(e.g., Pillow, 1989). Many of these young children thus may not have viewed themental violations as violations at all.

Finally, with regard to the physical/physical-with-explanation comparisons,there was again no effect for age. Unlike in the other trial types, however, chil-dren’s responses did not differ from chance, and furthermore, no age group ex-ceeded chance levels when tested separately. The individual patterns confirm this,with 6 (29%) of the 19 young 3-year-olds, 3 (14%) of the 21 older 3-year-olds, and8 (38%) of the 21 young 4-year-olds consistently choosing the violation withoutthe explanation as being the one that required magic.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

At what age do children begin to apply their knowledge of different types of causeto their understanding of different types of constraint? This question has been ad-dressed in the studies presented here by determining which types of violation chil-dren deem to require magic. In Experiment 1, older 3-year-olds and young4-year-olds responded that the physical violations, more than the social violations,required magic. The younger 3-year-olds, on the other hand, appeared not to dis-tinguish between the two types of law. In Experiment 2, we attempted to provide amore sensitive test by presenting pairs of violations and asking children to choosewhich one required magic. With this method, all three age groups were signifi-cantly more likely to say that the physical violations required magic than that thesocial violations did. The oldest two age groups also responded that mental viola-tions required magic more than that social violations did.

Most previous studies addressing children’s understanding of the differencesbetween physical laws and social rules have tested children 6 years of age andolder (e.g., Komatsu & Galotti, 1986; Nicholls & Thorkildsen, 1988). The set ofstudies that addressed this question in preschoolers (Kalish, 1998) indicated thatthe older preschoolers (4- to 5-year-olds) distinguished between social rules and


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physical laws but failed to uncover much evidence that younger preschool-agechildren did so. If such young children can distinguish between social and physicallaws, as shown in the studies presented here, why did they fail to do so in previousstudies? As discussed in the introduction of this article, the tasks in these past stud-ies were probably too difficult for very young preschoolers. In some of Kalish’sstudies children were required to predict whether children would actually violatelaws. The 3-year-olds appeared to be reluctant to say that children would ever doso. Other studies required children to provide verbal justifications, which proved tobe difficult for 3-year-olds. Our studies, on the other hand, were relatively easy forthese young children, as they simply had to respond magic or not magic (Experi-ment 1) or point to the violation that required magic (Experiment 2). Thus, theirknowledge that physical, but not social, violations cannot be explained using ordi-nary causality (and thus require magic) could be tapped.

Still, although our method was simple, it was indirect. To maintain that our re-sults show that young preschoolers truly understand that physical (but not social)violations cannot be explained, we have to assume that children invoke magicwhen they think there is no real-world explanation for a violation. What reasons dowe have to believe this is the case? Evidence comes from two sources. First, as dis-cussed in the introduction, several past studies have shown that children use magicin this way (e.g., Chandler & Lalonde, 1994; Phelps & Woolley, 1994). Second,children’s tendency to choose the mental violations (over the social ones) as beingmagic shows that magic is not something they associate with physical violations insome simple way; rather, it seems that regardless of the type of violation (mental orphysical), they believe magic is required if they cannot come up with an explana-tion for the violation. Nevertheless, although we showed that children understandthat some types of violations (i.e., mental and physical) cannot be explained usingordinary principles, we did not show that they understand the type of explanationrequired for those violations that can be explained (i.e., social violations). That is,we did not show that they realize that people violate social laws for reasons. It ispossible that children think there is some way to violate social rules, but they donot know precisely what that is. For example, they might realize that a boy can takea bath with his shoes on but do not know that it is his desire to violate the rule thatimpels him to do so. This question must be left to future research.

We had expected that young children might treat mental laws more similarly tosocial than to physical laws. Yet both the older 3-year-olds and the 4-year-olds con-sidered violations of mental laws to require magic significantly more often than theydidviolationsofsocial laws.Thus theirunderstandingofmental lawsappeared to lagjust slightly behind their understanding of physical laws. Previous work had demon-strated that young children understand that one cannot manipulate the physicalworld by thought alone (e.g., Estes et al., 1989). Children in those studies respondednegatively when asked whether someone could make, for example, some scissorsopen and close just by thinking about it. From those findings, however, we did not


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know the reason behind children’s negative judgments. Findings of the present re-search suggest that children’s understanding of the laws that govern mental activitymay have guided their judgments in these other studies. This may also explain whyyoung children view wishing as a magical process (Johnson & Harris, 1994;Woolleyetal.,1999). It alsosuggests that, ifgiven theopportunity,childrenwouldbeequally skeptical of the reality status of a variety of paranormal processes.

Given that children seem to believe that magic is required if they lack an expla-nation for a violation, how can we explain the fact that, in the trials in which bothviolations were physical, children did not systematically choose the violationwithout the explanation? We hypothesized that if children judge violations to bemagic when they have no explanation for the violation, then when explanationswere provided they would choose the other violation, the one without the explana-tion. One possibility is that instead of interpreting the explanations as real-worldexplanations, children interpreted them as involving magical mechanisms. For ex-ample, when children heard that a boy walked on the ceiling because he had glickson his feet, they might have judged the scenario to require magic and have inter-preted glicks accordingly. An analogy might be that fairies do their magic “bysprinkling fairy dust”—there is an explanation, but instead of making the scenariomore real, the explanation itself involves magic. Further research could evaluatethis possibility by manipulating the realistic or magical qualities of the explana-tions. More important, these findings indicate that it is not just any explanation thatwill do; there are constraints on the kinds of explanations children value.

In conclusion, much recent research has been concerned with the flexibility andappropriateness of children’s causal explanations (e.g., Hickling & Wellman,2001). These findings extend this work by showing that children as young as 3years can apply these different explanations to their understanding of differenttypes of law and by providing evidence regarding the development of this abilityduring the early preschool years.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by a Debra Beth Lobliner Summer Salary Award toCheryl Browne. We thank the children and parents who participated at theChildren’s Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. We also thank KatieShanahan and Emily Schultz for their help with data collection.

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Preschoolers' Magical Explanations for Violations of Physical, Social, and Mental Laws