The Influence of Question Wording on Children’s Tendencies to Provide Teleological Explanations for Natural Phenomena

Abstract

Abstract: Young children often provide teleological explanations for Entities and Phenomena in the natural world; stating, for example, that snow is for making snowmen or nighttime is for going to sleep. However, research supporting this stance has employed questions that could be considered to be teleologically-leading, suggesting a partially inaccurate view of children's tendency to provide teleological explanations. This paper compares a teleologically-leading treatment (what is X for?) with an open-treatment (why is there X?), finding that the leading-treatment resulted in significantly more teleological explanations that the open-treatment. This suggests children's proposed bias to provide teleological rationales about the natural world may be being overestimated.