Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The biological world includes many negatively-valenced activities, like predation, parasitism, and disease. How do parents discuss these activities with their children? Parents of children aged 4 to 12 (n = 147) were asked to discuss an illustrated book of animal facts to their child. Some facts were neutral (e.g., “meerkats live in groups of 2 to 30”) and some were negative (e.g., “meerkats wage war on neighboring colonies to expand their territory”). Parents did not selectively omit negative facts. Instead, they selectively embellished those facts, adding their own comments and questions, often couched in explicitly negative language. Children, in turn, were more likely to remember the negative facts but less likely to generalize them beyond the animal in the book. These findings suggest that early input relevant to biological competition may hamper children’s developing understanding of ecology and evolution.