Moral development research has often focused on the development of moral reasoning without considering children's understanding of moral advisors. We investigated how children construe sources of moral advice by examining the characteristics that children deem necessary for reasoning about moral or scientific problems. In two experiments, children…

In 4 studies, the authors examined how intuitions about the relative difficulties of the sciences develop. In Study 1, familiar everyday phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics were pretested in adults, so as to be equally difficult to explain. When participants in kindergarten, Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, and college were…

Three experiments investigated whether children in grades K, 2, and 4 (n = 144) view emotional comprehension as important in solving moral dilemmas. The experiments asked whether a human or an artificially intelligent machine would be best at solving different types of problems, ranging from moral and emotional to nonmoral and pragmatic. In…

Adults overestimate the detail and depth of their explanatory knowledge, but through providing explanations they recognize their initial illusion of understanding. By contrast, they are much more accurate in making self-assessments for other kinds of knowledge, such as for procedures, narratives, and facts. Two studies examined this "illusion of…