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Children's understanding of habitual behaviour
Author(s) -
Goldwater Micah B.,
Gershman Samuel J.,
Moul Caroline,
Ludowici Charles,
Burton Amy,
Killer Brittany,
Kuhnert RebeccaLee,
Ridgway Kate
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.12951
Subject(s) - psychology , flexibility (engineering) , affect (linguistics) , reinforcement , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , statistics , mathematics , communication
Abstract Research into the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) has shown how children from a very early age infer other people's goals. However, human behaviour is sometimes driven not by plans to achieve goals, but by habits, which are formed over long periods of reinforcement. Habitual and goal‐directed behaviours are often aligned with one another but can diverge when the optimal behavioural policy changes without being directly reinforced (thus specifically hobbling the habitual learning strategy). Unlike the flexibility of goal‐directed behaviour, rigid habits can cause agents to persist in behaviour that is no longer adaptive. In the current study, all children predict agents will tend to behave consistently with their goals, but between the ages of 5 and 10, children showed an increasing understanding of how habits can cause agents to persistently take suboptimal actions. These findings stand out from the typical way the development of social reasoning is examined, which instead focuses on children's increasing appreciation of how others' beliefs or expectations affect how they will act in service of their goals. The current findings show that children also learn that under certain circumstances, people's actions are suboptimal despite potentially ‘knowing better.’