The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds
The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds
复制标题
虚构世界的直观宇宙论
DOI：
10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199275731.003.0005
复制
发表时间：
2006
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Paul Bloom
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. Skolnick;Paul Bloom
孩子们一生中的大部分时间都沉浸在小说中，因为他们参与了童话故事，书籍，电影和电视节目中的故事。由于这种沉浸感，发展心理学家一直对儿童如何理解蝙蝠侠和海绵宝宝等虚构人物感兴趣。对于一个成年人来说，什么是真实的，什么不是之间有一个鲜明的区别，但这可能不是儿童的情况。皮亚杰（Piaget，1962）认为，儿童倾向于幻想，他们缺乏区分真实的和虚幻的能力。现在有大量的证据表明这种观点是错误的。当被明确询问时，即使是3岁的孩子也能理解鬼魂、怪物和女巫是“虚构的”，而狗、房子和熊是“真实的”（例如Morison和Gardner，1978; Wellman和Estes，1986; DiLalla和沃森，1988; Harris等，1991; Samuels和Taylor，1994; Golomb和Galasso，1995）。他们也不会混淆想象与现实-一个想象铅笔在盒子里的孩子不会错误地引导别人去找铅笔（Woolley和Phelps 1994;也见Leslie 1994）。而且，与流行的观点相反，那些创造想象中朋友的孩子意识到他们作为想象中的人的地位（Taylor 1999）。因此，这项研究得出的共识是，对什么是真实的和什么是虚构的之间的区别的理解，如果不是更早的话，也是在3岁之前就存在的。在我们自己的研究和本章中，我们将接受儿童能够区分现实和幻想的一般结论，我们将提出自己的证据来支持这一主张。但我们在这里的主要目的是论证，以前的研究还没有提出正确的问题。成人和儿童对小说的直觉理解比发展心理学家所认为的要微妙得多。
Children spend much of their lives immersed in fiction, as they engage with stories in fairy tales, books, movies, and television shows. Because of this immersion, developmental psychologists have long been interested in how children make sense of fictional characters such as Batman and SpongeBob SquarePants. For an adult, there is a sharp division between what is real and what is not, but this might not be the case for children. One traditional view of development, defended most notably by Piaget (1962), is that young children are prone to magical thinking—they lack the capacity to distinguish the real from the make-believe. There is now abundant evidence that this view is mistaken. When explicitly asked, even 3-year-olds understand that ghosts, monsters, and witches are ‘makebelieve’ and dogs, houses, and bears are ‘real-life’ (e.g. Morison and Gardner 1978; Wellman and Estes 1986; DiLalla and Watson 1988; Harris et al. 1991; Samuels and Taylor 1994; Golomb and Galasso 1995). They also do not confuse imagination with reality—a child who imagines that a pencil is in a box will not mistakenly direct someone asking for a pencil to the box (Woolley and Phelps 1994; see also Leslie 1994). And, contrary to popular belief, those children who create imaginary friends are aware of their status as imaginary (Taylor 1999). The consensus from this work, then, is that an understanding of the distinction between what is real and what is make-believe is present by the age of 3, if not earlier. In our own research and in this chapter, we will accept the general conclusion that children can distinguish reality from fantasy, and we will present our own evidence that supports this claim. But our main purpose here is to argue that this body of previous research has not yet asked the right questions. Adults’ and children’s intuitive understanding of fiction1 is considerably more nuanced than developmental psychologists have assumed.