Read The Illusion of Conscious Will for Free Online Page A

six) might focus not on whether the pushing was done on purpose but rather on whether Kelsey’s shoes were ruined by mud. 10 This is a bit odd because focusing on intentions could be very useful to children, particularly when claiming good intentions might reduce their punishment (“I pushed her in the creek to prevent her from getting heatstroke”). And while children do pay a bit more regard to their own intentions than to those of others (Keasey 1977), they still focus mostly on the damage. This lack of interest in intentions in moral judgments leads one to suspect that young children also may not appreciate minds in the same way grownups do.
    In looking at how children judge inanimate objects, Piaget (1929) noted that they sometimes ascribe the properties of living beings, including the property of intention, to nonliving things. Based on the discussion of animism in anthropology (the tendency to ascribe living properties to nonliving things; Lévy-Bruhl 1910; Mead 1932), Piaget discovered that children could fall prey to the same thing—overattributing mental properties to systems that are better understood as mechanical. His attribution of animism to children has turned out to be controversial because he overstated the case for older children in contemporary cultures (Looft and Bartz 1969). Still, there is compelling documentation of animistic thinking in young children around the world. An interview with one four-year-old boy about why a toy boat floats, for instance, went like this:
    — Why does it not go to the bottom?
    — Can I make it go down to the bottom?
    — Try it and you will see.
    — It comes up again!
    — Why does it not stay at the bottom?
    — Because the man who is under this [under the roof] doesn’t want to go down.
    — Here’s a nail.
    — It will go to the bottom.
    — Why?
    — Because there is a man in here [in the nail] and he likes to go to the bottom. (Laurendeau and Pinard 1962, 209)
    10 . Research following up Piaget’s initial suggestions has pointed out some problems with his approach and has suggested that the use of intention information in moral judgment comes somewhat earlier than Piaget had suggested, but it has also generally substantiated the conclusion that young children underplay the importance of intention in moral judgment (Schultz 1980).
    At first blush, Piaget’s pair of insights suggest paradoxically that children underuse intention (in moral judgment) and also overuse it (in perceiving inanimate causality). This makes sense, though, when we realize that the child’s notion of a mind is under construction. Without a fully developed idea of mental processes, children can fail to attribute intent when they should (in judging human beings) and attribute it too often when they shouldn’t (in judging objects). Children are faced with the problem of building a picture of their own minds and the minds of others, and of achieving an understanding of what it is not to have a mind as well. Early in life, they guess that things without minds might have mind-like properties of intention and that things they will later learn have minds might not possess such intention.
    Piaget’s perspective has culminated in the contemporary literature on the development of theory of mind in animals (Premack and Woodruff 1978) and in children (Astington 1993; Perner 1991b; Wellman 1990), and in work that contrasts how children develop an understanding of agency, intention, and will with how they develop an understanding of causality, motion, and the principles of physics (Astington, Harris, and Olson 1988; Carey 1996; Gelman 1990; Gelman, Durgin, and Kaufman 1995; Wellman and Gelman 1992). Neither the perception of the physical world nor the perception of the mental world is a “given” to the human newborn. Although the neonate has rudimentary abilities in both areas, both systems must be developed over time and experience as ways of understanding what is going on.
    The field of