Just happened to notice an interesting paper on another cultural difference: in the US, children who have better self-control tend to believe more strongly in free will; in China, Singapore and Peru, self-control and belief in free will are not correlated.
The authors hypothesize that this is because of different cultural models about the nature of behavior: US culture explains self-control as a property of the individual, whereas the culture in the other countries explains it as a property of the social context the individual is in. As a result, when US children successfully practice self-control, they see it as affirming the existence of free will, whereas when children in other countries practice self-control, they see it as affirming the effect of their context on their behavior.
Four-year-old children in the U.S. generally say that if a person “really wants” to do something – play a fun game, for example – she has to do it (cannot choose not to do it). Similarly, 4-year-olds say if someone “really doesn’t want” to do something – e.g. look in a scary closet – they cannot choose to do it. (Kushnir et al., 2015; Wente et al., 2016). Six-year-olds and older children in the U.S. are more optimistic about their own and others’ ability to perform undesirable actions and to inhibit desirable ones – they have a conception more like the classic Western notion of absolute free will. [...]
Children in different cultures grow up surrounded by these different folk-psychological theories of mind and self. For example, children growing up in middle-class North American cultures are raised by adults who often view intentional actions as stemming from individual desires, preferences, and subjective mental states. Children growing up in Asian cultures are raised by adults who more frequently view agents as responding to situations, social roles, and the expectations of other individuals. Of course, all children across these cultural contexts develop understandings of individual minds and mental states and learn the importance of social roles and expectations. However, culture plays a role in how we emphasize and weigh these different factors in ordinary causal-explanatory reasoning about actions (Morris & Peng, 1994). Culture also plays a role in how we talk to children about actions: a large body of work shows that, in conversations with children about events and experiences, parents in individualistic versus collectivistic cultural contexts consistently emphasize individual mental states versus relational roles and social expectations respectively, and through these conversations transmit different cultural views on agency and self to their children (Wang, 2006; Wang & Leichtman, 2000). It is therefore conceivable that, even for children as young as four, self-control experience could be interpreted through a cultural lens. [...]
The results from Study 1 show a culturally moderated relationship between self-control abilities and beliefs about the “free will” to act against or inhibit strong desires. Though we found similar self-control performance across the three cultures, Singaporean children reported weaker belief in the free will than Chinese and U.S. children. These findings on their own indicate that free will beliefs and self-control abilities do not necessarily align, at least when contrasting samples across cultures. Second, controlling for age, U.S. children who held a stronger belief in their ability to act against or inhibit strong desires performed better on tasks requiring self-control. No such correlations were observed in the two East Asian cultures, again despite overall similarities in the main developmental trajectory of both their self-control abilities and their free will beliefs. [...]
One explanation for the culturally moderated link between beliefs and abilities is that it reflects both cultural and experiential influences. If children in our U.S. sample experience their self-control as internally guided, then they may interpret their first-person experiences in situations that require self-control as evidence in support of the possibility that they can successfully control impulses and desires at will. As they get older, they more readily endorse the idea that agents have the free will to act against their desires because they actually see themselves get better at practicing self-control. On the other hand, children from Singapore and China may experience their self-control as externally guided, caused by social norms or external influences without the intermediary influence of an internal “will”. In that case, the experience of self-control might have no effect on beliefs about free will. [...]
These data suggest that the Western causal-explanatory framework– which include an emphasis on internal mental states – frame children’s experience of their own self-control. As further support for this idea, we found some indication that the culturally-moderated link has a causal basis. In Study 2, self-control behaviors influenced children’s free will beliefs, at least in the short-term. In particular, children who failed two self-control tasks had a lower belief in free will compared to children who completed one or both self-control tasks successfully. We did not find a causal influence in the opposite direction, suggesting that improving or depleting self-control in the short term involves more than simply affirming that one believes it is possible. [...]
Our results imply that developing beliefs about internal struggles between desire and “will” are only one of many possible cultural models for action understanding. U.S. children are socialized to connect their emerging understanding of desires – how they operate, how they conflict and how they can be overridden – with the struggles of the will. Thus, they may naturally interpret the experience of self-control as an internal struggle of conflicting desires, and learn to attribute self-control performance to an act of will. Children in Singapore, China, (and perhaps Peru) may be learning to view the same struggle in the same type of self-control task through a different attributional framework. Speculatively, experiences of successful and failed self-control experiences might lead to attributions about norm compliance, without necessarily invoking internal “will” as an intermediary. In China, for example, parents place a strong emphasis on consequences towards others (e.g. family members) and group norm-following as causal explanations for actions (Wang, 2006; Yau & Smetana, 2003). In Singapore, children reference punishment for norm violations as an explanation for why norms must necessarily limit the possibility of acting on desires (Chernyak et al., 2019). Thus, for children in these cultures, beliefs that matter most for self-regulation, and thus the beliefs that are most influenced by evidence from self-control success and/or failure, may be those that govern the extent to which social norms constrain personal autonomy. With regards to Peruvian children, our findings here are necessarily preliminary. More background is needed about socio-cognitive development of young children in Peru and how it connects to the transmission of cultural values. Thus, the variety of causal-explanatory frameworks, and how they emerge in development, and how (or whether) they connect to children’s self-control remain open questions for future research.
Just happened to notice an interesting paper on another cultural difference: in the US, children who have better self-control tend to believe more strongly in free will; in China, Singapore and Peru, self-control and belief in free will are not correlated.
The authors hypothesize that this is because of different cultural models about the nature of behavior: US culture explains self-control as a property of the individual, whereas the culture in the other countries explains it as a property of the social context the individual is in. As a result, when US children successfully practice self-control, they see it as affirming the existence of free will, whereas when children in other countries practice self-control, they see it as affirming the effect of their context on their behavior.