Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

People's everyday decisions are shaped by their understanding of what is possible and impossible. They prepare for things that can happen, like rainstorms and house fires, and ignore things that cannot happen, like going back in time. But we do not know how people decide what is possible, or why people's beliefs about possibility change as they get older. Adults often believe in the possibility of things that may never happen, like bringing extinct animals back to life. But 4--year--olds do not believe in the possibility of things that are simply strange or improbable, like a person having a pet zebra. Why do adults think that impossible things can happen while young children think improbable things cannot? In my work, I found that children use a similarity heuristic to decide what is possible. Children will say that an improbable event can happen if they know that something similar has already happened. For example, they will say that a person could have a pet zebra if they first learn about another person's pet elephant. I also found that children think similar things are possible even when they do not know how those things could actually happen. My proposed research has two objectives. First, it will help us understand how people's memories of events shape their beliefs about what else is possible. I will explore this across six experiments testing two explanations for why similarity shapes children's beliefs about possibility. One explanation is that children assume that similar events happen in similar ways. The other explanation is that children often reason about possibility by deciding whether events belong in a category (e.g., "pet" zebra), and judge events to be impossible when they do not belong. Both explanations might help us understand how possibility judgments develop with age. Second, this research will investigate whether "seeing" similarities lets people see possibilities. Two experiments will explore whether children will agree that improbable events are possible if they are led to view these events as being similar to ordinary ones. Two other experiments will explore how children's beliefs about possibility determine their interpretations of analogies and metaphors. A final experiment will examine whether people who are better at thinking about analogies are also more likely to see new possibilities. This work will represent a major contribution to our understanding of how people decide what is possible. Most work has explored how beliefs about possibility are driven by an understanding of how things could happen or whether things should happen. My work instead suggests that beliefs about possibility are often explained by perceptions of similarity. This research will help us predict the kinds of societal goals that Canadians are likely to believe in. My work suggests that people will believe in something when they feel that a similar thing has already been done-even if they are of unsure of how it will be accomplished.