许晶
美国华盛顿大学人类学系 Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, USA
【摘要】看见作为认知主体的儿童主张从 “被动受教 / 被研究的对象 ” 转向“积极推理、共建意义的行动者”。本文交织自我民族志（ 母子关于清华 / 教育意义的对话与音乐学习经历 ）、对汉学经典民族志与田野资料的再阐释，以及跨文化发展心理学实验（ 含 “棉花糖” 范式的文化再解读与在地小任务 ）与认知人类学理论，提出一套 “普遍—多元并存” 的儿童学习与道德发展框架。研究要点：其一，儿童在真实情境中既是 “被试” 亦是 “对话者”，能察言观色、推断意图并参与意义协商，要求研究与教学承认情境性与互主观性；其二，同伴互动与游戏构成儿童道德与文化学习的横轴，惩罚效果取决于儿童对正当性与关系秩序的推理，非线性 “刺激—反应”；其三，跨文化习惯会重写实验指标的含义，需避免将文化实践误判为能力差异；其四，审美与惊奇激活 “探索—利用权衡” 中的探索引擎，课程与学校治理应为儿童保留探索空间并赋予实质性参与；其五，当前大模型难以充分还原儿童在游戏 / 象征中的创造性意义生成。本文在方法上主张把儿童纳入知识共建流程，在实践上倡导 “教师俯身 / 起身” 的双向姿态与儿童参与式教育决策，为教育研究、课程设计与人机智能对话提供路径。
关键词： 认知人类学；儿童为认知主体；道德发展；互主观性；同伴学习；探索—利用权衡；跨文化实验；教育决策参与
https://doi.org/10.64053/PYHG2600
灵魂拷问
2024 年 9 月初，十四岁的儿子在国内度过暑假，返回美国。西雅图初秋傍晚，松柏苍翠，我带着儿子散步，讨论他这趟回国的体验。孩子突然问我：“妈妈，你都考上了清华大学，为什么要来美国呢？在西雅图（普通美国人）有谁知道清华大学啊（言下之意，在国内有谁不知道清华大学）?” 突如其起来的灵魂拷问仿佛当头棒喝，我怔住了，思量孩子为何提问，我该如何作答。这个在西雅图散养长大的孩子，短短一个月的回国旅程，就感受到深刻的文化冲击，甚至价值冲击。他对美国大学排名了解甚少，却已经觉察出清华大学对于国内家长和学生意味着什么，也体会到国内教育竞争的压力。他看到小孩子连暑假都那样忙碌疲惫，跟我吐露心声：“妈妈，我以后只想回国度假，不敢回去上学，（回国那段时间）有点困惑人生目的是什么。” 我这才明白他究竟在纳闷什么：他惊异发现，考上北大清华简直是国内很多家庭的最大目标。我试着回答他 ：“妈妈小时候确实觉得考上清华很重要。可是，考好大学就是人生唯一的价值吗？不是的，我现在不这么看。生命很宽广，不管考上怎样的学校，往后人生都要经历诸多劳苦愁烦，也有很多快乐的事跟上哪所大学无关”。我也把问题抛给他 ：“你现在的生活过得有意义有盼望吗？” 他很自然地回答：“有”。孩子的灵魂拷问直指教育的价值甚至生命的意义。
长久以来一直是我在凝视孩子，从他呱呱坠地到成长为快乐自信的少年。庸常生活中这样的对话却让我察觉，我也在被他凝视。儿童其实一直是认知主体，是具有强大学习能力、能够主动感知、思考、理解并建构知识的行动者 ( agent )。每个孩子作为独特的个体，透过自己的心智情感与周遭世界发生联结。身为母亲，我和绝大多数家长一样，育儿焦虑无时不刻，无处安放 ：教育目的为何？什么是好的教育？有没有最佳的育儿理论？我们能设计孩子的成长吗？育儿焦虑大体出于自上而下的姿态，将儿童视作客体、视作凝视对象。教育价值见仁见智，只是在研究与养育交织的过程中慢慢看见作为认知主体的儿童，多多少少对我自己起到一些治愈作用。因此我感恩有机会研究儿童，尤其是在人类学与认知科学交叉的认知人类学视野下研究儿童。从人类学田野到心理学实验研究，从当代中国到不同时空多样文化情境，从观察者到养育者，我不断被儿童的创造力所震撼。儿童的心灵世界像磁场一样吸引着我，那里隐藏着何以为人的奥秘。谨以拙文回顾育儿与研究交织的经历，介绍跨学科的治学路径与分析案例，看见作为认知主体的儿童。
惊奇与敬畏
孩子出生的那一年，我在读人类学博士，兼修发展心理学的课程，亲身经历了田野和理论的相互照亮。我零星记录过儿子幼时的点滴，感慨小生命成长之神奇 ：育儿过程最有趣的不是如何教养，而是如何学习，学习俯下身去，透过孩子的眼睛看世界。孩子刚出生不久，一天我给他洗澡的时候，发现他在静静地看着对面的白墙，原来澡盆的水波映在墙上光影奇幻，让他感到惊奇。家里一幅挂画画着小鸭子，我时常抱着他哼一首 “小黄鸭” 的儿歌，有时会指着那幅挂画；几个月大的某一天，当我念到“小黄鸭”，他的视线突然转向挂画，在语言表征、外界物体以及母亲的沟通信号 ( communicative cues ) 之间建立了逻辑关联。这些时刻有如灵光闪现：婴儿的凝视给研究者打开了通往人类前语言期精神世界的窗口，许多心理学实验就是通过测量婴儿注视时长或者分析社交场景中婴儿如何与成年人视线融合、共享注意力和意向性，来探究婴儿的先验知识、学习机制和认知发展。我带着一岁的儿子去超市，我目光所及全是家居用品，而这个小人儿站在他的高度颠颠儿地走路，一眼看到货架底层摆着一个大球，他最喜欢的玩具，他一边拉着我，一边指着那个球，眼里只有那一样东西。孩子有自己的视角，并不是我所习以为常的视角，那个场景让我印象深刻。孩子六岁的时候，放学回家，我一如往常问他在学校都做什么了，他很认真地说 ：“Fly trap（ 捕苍蝇装置 ）!” 然后绘声绘色描述从小朋友那里听到的两个不同的捕苍蝇装置。一天的学校生活，我关心的是老师课堂教了什么内容，而对他来说捕苍蝇装置、或者说从小朋友那里听到的新鲜事才是亮点。第二天早上一起床，他就迫不及待跟我讲蜜蜂和马蜂的不同，蜜蜂蜇人一次自己就牺牲了，马蜂蜇人一百次自己都不会，简直跟发现了新大陆一样，这也是从小朋友那里听来的。我这个成年人的脑回路几乎从未处理过有关捕苍蝇、蜜蜂和马蜂的信息，可孩子热切的眼神表明，他所关心的世界与我视为理所当然的世界并不一样。也许去了解孩子看到的世界，才是教育的开端。
而陪伴孩子学音乐的历程，则让我大开眼界，领悟到什么是好的教育。第一次送儿子去试小提琴课，记忆犹新。五岁半的他性格敏感害羞，走在窄窄的楼道里，抱着我说 ：“妈妈我怕。” 我问：“宝宝你怕什么？” 他怯怯地说 ：“我怕拉不好小提琴”。我从没学过小提琴，无法感同身受，只能画饼讲道理 ：“我知道你怕学不好，可是什么东西，只要认真学多练习，都能学好，比如你小时候本来不会骑两轮单车，后来外婆带着你每天都练习，不是就学会了吗？” 他似懂非懂点点头，小手紧紧拽着我。到了教室门口，听到各种琴声混杂，有悠扬娴熟的，也有发出咔擦声响的初学者，我说 ：“宝宝，你听，有个小朋友也是刚学，也不会拉；可是你看一直练习，就像另外一个琴声那么好听了对吧？” 老师工作室门口贴着日本音乐教育家铃木镇一先生的名言，也是老师的教育信条 ：“When love is deep, much can be accomplished. … I am mentally preparing myself for the five-year-old mind. I want to come down to their physical limitations and up to their sense of wonder and awe” 中文意思 ：“爱若足够深沉，万事皆可达成。我预备自己的心智，以迎接一个五岁孩子的精神世界 —— 我要俯身，适应他们身体条件的局限，也要起来，追随他们对世界充满惊奇与敬畏的感知” ( Suzuki and Suzuki 1993 ) 。学界对铃木教学法褒贬不一，但这句话让我深受触动，谦卑自己，“看见” 儿童。走进工作室见到老师，印象极好。老太太满头银发，说话慢条斯理，对小孩子温柔耐心。我问她小提琴这么难，好动的小男孩如何能学好。老师笑意盈盈地说 ：“我特别喜欢教孩子，真的太奇妙了。你不知道一个小小的孩子有多么大的潜力！” 我们就这样踏上一段新旅程。
这位老师带了很多低龄小男孩，其中不乏顽皮淘气之主。作为小提琴启蒙老师，她的第一教育原则是不扼杀学生的兴趣。她极少批评学生，对于练琴时间也没有硬性规定，而是因材施教，滋养孩子对音乐的感知力。每次上课都感受到老师对音乐教育的热爱，对孩子的慈爱，与门口贴的 “爱若足够深沉” 相称。一年以后，老师教新的练习曲，儿子很喜欢。我问他为什么喜欢（ 这看似枯燥的练习曲 ）？他表述一番，大意是喜欢乐曲旋律有高低戏剧转换，有不同速度。我非常惊讶 ：一个只知道玩变形金刚的小男孩，对音乐如此细腻又天然的感悟从哪里来？老师教到一半，问他 ：“我觉得这些够多了，今天就学到这里吧？” 孩子摇头，表示想接着学完，老师顺着他的意思继续把乐曲教完。我细细观察他练习的样子，每一个新的指法，乐音，或者节奏，都好专注。他调动着自己的精神世界，来解析、认识、并且生成新的时刻。他眼神聚焦在琴板上，黑黑的长睫毛像蝴蝶一样停歇着，一个一个瞬间都像油画般的美。就在那一天我看到他的内在小马达已经开启，进入到了一个美的新世界！感恩遇上好老师，孩子习琴将近十年，越大越爱音乐。他会会拉着我欣赏他爱的曲目、说听马勒第五交响曲感受到超越有形经验、无以言表的震撼。我羡慕他有这样的爱好，将来面对人生种种境遇，或悲或喜，总有情感出口。与音乐相比，有的科目则完全激发不起他的兴趣，我也无法勉强，毕竟人生的路还得他自己走。尽管只养育这一个孩子，我看到儿童的个体意志如此鲜明，也慢慢理解铃木镇一的名言，“起来，追随他们对世界充满惊奇与敬畏的感知”。
跨学科对话
看见作为认知主体的儿童，追随他们奇妙的精神世界，这个观点既来源于我对儿童发展的理解，又持续滋养着我的研究，型塑我超越学科分野探索儿童世界的研究轨迹。主流社会科学，包括人类学在内，并不重视儿童认知，甚至曾有一篇题为《 人类学家为什么不喜欢儿童？》 ( Hirschfeld 2002 ) 的论文流传甚广。尽管儿童对于理解 “何以为人”、“文化习得” 等人类学核心问题至关重要，主流人类学家对儿童的认知能力与认知发展机制关注甚少，且忽略了儿童认知发展对理解社会文化有何意义。即便教育人类学，大多数研究关注焦点也在于 “育儿”，偏重于教育制度、理念和策略，而并不在于理解儿童自身丰富的思维情感世界。许多人类学者对于儿童认知都抱持着旧时代、前认知科学的偏见 ：一种是行为主义偏见，将儿童心智视作黑匣子，只关注外在环境刺激-外在行为反应即可，无需关注大脑信息处理的复杂机制；另一种则是极端建构主义偏见，将儿童心智视作白纸一张，任由环境塑造（ Xu， 2024: 15 ）。在社会科学的话语体系里，儿童不过是环境的产物，这个环境包括社会结构、文化理念、政治经济系统。认知人类学发端于20世纪中叶打开人类心灵 ( mind ) 黑匣子的 “认知科学革命” ( Miller 2003 ) ，将思维心智视为理解人类行为和社会文化的重要基础，也格外重视儿童发展；这个方向处于人类学与心理学交叉地带，将社会文化与个体心理认知的交界面置于理论聚光灯之下，既研究心理机制，又秉持人类学的跨文化视野和反思精神，成为我所投身的理论方向（ 许晶，2020 ）。从认知人类学的视角来看，儿童不是教育的对象，而是教育的主角。人类有漫长的童年期，儿童是地球上前所未有的学习者，可以说学习是儿童的天性。儿童在语言习得和对生物世界、物理世界等知识体系的建构上都有很强的主体性，使得这些领域的教育成为可能。我的研究方向偏重儿童社会认知 ( social cognition )，意即儿童如何理解社会角色关系、文化习俗、道德规范等。谈起人类文化的传承与演变，绝大部分研究专注于成年人的角色，然而人类之所以能积累丰富的社会文化知识，甚至人类能够繁衍至今，儿童自身的学习能力不可忽略 ( Lew-Levy and Amir 2024 ) 。儿童学习具有主动性 —— 儿童主动探索世界而非被动接收信息 ( Gweon and Zhu 2024 ) 、反思性 —— 儿童就像科学家那样能不断反思和修正知识体系 ( Gopnik 2010 ) 、和意向性 —— 人类在婴儿期就可以按照意图目标展开行动，也发展出理解他人意向的能力 ( Wellman 2014 ) 。（ 许晶，2020 ）。
二十年前我偶然看到一部中文纪录片，《 幼儿园 》，记录了武汉一所寄宿幼儿园的日常生活，小朋友的言行举止看似童稚却又发人深省，我萌生出研究儿童的念想。例如这个场景，摄制组一名成年女性（ 此处暂且名为 “阿姨” ）与一个小男孩的对话：
阿姨：“你最喜欢班里那个同学？”
男孩：“女的？”
阿姨：“嗯”。
男孩：“呃 ……. 不知道 ……” （ 犹豫害羞 ）
阿姨：“不知道？我看你喜欢了不敢说” （ 边问边笑 ）
男孩：“你怎么看得出来呀？”
阿姨：“我一看就看出来了，你犹豫了好半天。可能我也知道是谁，那个白白的”。
男孩：“就你知道你怎么还要问我咧？”
我在国内大学演讲播放过这个片段，学生们会心一笑。有的学生告诉我，在那短短几个回合的对话中看到了文化情境的影响：“即使访谈者与小朋友已经有了比较强的信任关系，但是处在中国文化情境 —— 小孩子是不可以早恋的、谈到感情问题的中国人基本上比较害羞 —— 小朋友依旧选择隐藏（ 自己的想法 ）”；也有学生看到了具体研究情境中研究者与研究对象之间的互相揣摩 ：“在那个情境中，孩子会犹豫他说出的话，对方的反应，而访谈者看出孩子在犹豫，又在推论孩子为什么会犹豫”。 1 这么一个小片段让我看到：1）小朋友在幼儿期就已经发展出感受和推测他人思维情感的能力，认知科学称之为 “心理理论” ( Theory of Mind, To M )，是人类丰富社会认知的基础；要理解儿童认知的发展机制，需要有心理学的系统知识和严谨方法；2）儿童的精神世界深受社会文化环境的影响，社会文化如何型塑个体生活世界属于人类学的研究范畴；3）不仅如此，人类学的认识论方法论强调知识生产的情境性 ( situational knowledge ) ，研究者和研究对象的主体间性 ( intersubjectivity ) ：研究者和研究对象带着各自复杂意义系统、权力位置、人生经验和交往意图在具体情境中发生联结。
二十年后再回望《 幼儿园 》片段，我领悟到认知人类学这个跨学科方向不仅帮助我探索理论问题，儿童认知发展如何与社会文化环境交互，也启发我追寻更深层的认识论问题，有关儿童发展的知识如何生成。例如，法国认知人类学家丹•斯珀泊（ Dan Sperber ）和英国语言学家迪尔德丽•威尔逊（ DeirdreWilson ）合著的 “关联理论” ( Sperber and Wilson 1996 ) 提供了一个超越学科界限、凸显人类认知主体的哲学框架。透过 “关联理论” 来看我的研究领域，不论是通过人类学的田野调查还是心理学的控制实验，我们生产出关于儿童的知识都是人际沟通互动的结果：研究者和研究对象在具体行为情境和多重意义系统中互相揣测，对彼此交际意图进行认知推理，找到话语 / 沟通信号和语境之间的关联性。不光成年人，儿童也以认知主体的角色投身于这些揣测、推理和交流过程。例如《 幼儿园 》访谈场景，小男孩试图在访谈者的言语信号和情境之间寻找关联、推测访谈者的意图，才会心生困惑 ：你为何明知故问？有关认识论问题，我在新书《 “任性” 的儿童 》 ( Xu 2024 ) 强调，儿童主动 “察言观色” 的能力对于田野研究结果有很大的影响，甚至是民族志得以可能的基础；换言之，透过儿童视角，我重新发现田野实践与书写的内在肌理。这本新书是对汉学人类学经典田野资料的重新发现：1950 年代末、人类学家武雅士夫妇 ( Arthur and Margery Wolf ) 在台北盆地汉人村庄进行了两年多田野调查，是欧美学界第一个聚焦汉人儿童的田野研究，收集了包括访谈、观察和心理实验在内大量资料，却因为种种原因没有完成对这批资料的系统分析（ 许晶，2023 ）。我对这批资料的重新阐释落足于儿童丰富的社会认知，因为所有文本都是当地孩子们与各位研究者沟通互动的结果。仅以儿童打架为例 ：武雅士在附近小学做问卷调查，一个重要问题是关于打架，假设被同龄人欺负，儿童会如何反应。孩子们选的答案是不反应，不还手，因为他们从小被教导，小孩子不应该打架。可是在另外一个情境下，当武雅士的研究助理在村里访谈孩子们，问到同样的问题，很多小孩子表示会以牙还牙，该出手时就出手，并不顾忌 “正确答案” 。同样的问题，截然不同的回答，反映出儿童对研究情境、研究者身份和意图的敏感：在孩子们眼里，美国人类学家武雅士是奇怪的外人、他们不敢跟他接近，当面惧怕、背后却戏称他为 “兜鼻仔” ，在他眼皮底下填写问卷，而且是在气氛严格、只能讲国语的教室里，孩子们乖乖给出正确答案；而那位十几岁的本族研究助理则被孩子们唤做 “陈姐姐”，是他们亲近的玩伴，且用孩子们的母语（ 闽南语 ）进行交流，所以孩子们不介意在她面前吐露真心，且描绘出生动细节。说到底，我们在研究儿童的时候，儿童也在研究我们。我选择用武雅士拍摄的一张儿童嬉戏照片当作书的封面，因为这张照片捕捉了研究者 / 摄影师与研究对象目光交汇的瞬间，他们的彼此凝视。
不仅人类学民族志研究需要重视儿童与研究者的 “互主观性” ( intersubjectivity )，以控制实验见长的心理学研究也面临意义阐释的问题。儿童并不只是 “被试” ( subject )而已，更是 “对话者” ( interlocutor )；儿童在实验中的言语行为反映出他们的文化知识以及他们对研究情境的理解 ( Xu 2019 ) 。以发展心理学经典研究、棉花糖实验（ The Marshmallow Test ） 为例：该实验通过测试儿童是否会为获得第二颗棉花糖而放弃食用眼前的糖果，来评定儿童的延迟满足能力（ 能否为了更大的奖励而克制即时冲动 ）；近来跨文化比较研究则引发学者对该实验意义的反思。例如， 同样的实验程序，日本儿童在等待棉花糖奖励时表现出更长的延迟满足时间； 但当奖励换成包装好的礼物时，美国儿童的等待时间反而超过日本儿童; 实验结果反映的并不是儿童能力对比，而是文化惯习的差异：在日本，等待进食是重要的餐前礼仪，在美国，圣诞节或生日派对等节日场合延迟拆礼物则是常见的文化实践 ( Yanaoka et al. 2022 ) 。我与合作团队目前正在进行的实验研究也发现微妙的文化差异：有个实验环节是给参与的儿童观看简单几个身体动作，然后请儿童来模仿；有些西雅图华裔儿童迟疑中揣测哪一个动作是正确答案，或者给我展演他们最擅长的动作，仿佛实验是一场权威人物对他们的考察，这跟他们从小浸润的教育文化有关，也可能与我的华裔成年人身份有关；而非洲刚果的孩子则羞于模仿，因为在他们部落文化里身体动作（ 舞蹈 ）是集体仪式，不是个体表达。儿童带着哪些知识、规范、预期进入实验情境、与什么样的研究者互动、如何与研究者互动，决定了心理实验是否真的在测量所要评估的概念，以及在多大程度上达到了测量目标。将儿童视作认知主体，心理实验与田野民族志某种程度上异曲同工。
道德发展
道德能力是人性的奥秘之一，人类群体道德之复杂性远超动物世界。然而，有关道德发展，人类学和心理学两种路径分野迥异，各自有其局限 ：心理学关注个体心理机制，对于人和道德的假设带有强烈普遍主义的色彩，人类学理论则批评抽离语境的普遍道德理性，落脚于人在多样而具体的结构、制度、话语和生活世界型塑之下的伦理实践；二十一世纪认知科学的经验研究发现人类道德知识与情感萌芽于婴儿期，儿童发展成为研究人类道德心理的重要方向；而人类学近二十几年涌现出关于道德伦理的思想体系则忽略了儿童发展这一维度、尤其遮蔽了作为认知主体的儿童（ 许晶，2020 ）。我的研究试图在人类学和心理学之间架设桥梁，促进认知与文化的理论对话，以田野民族志认识论为基础，整合访谈、观察、问卷、心理实验、计算文本分析、行为建模分析等多种方法，来理解儿童的道德发展与学习。我的研究倡导新的理论取向，即道德发展与学习兼具普遍性与多元性 ( simultaneously universalistic and pluralistic )，两者并非冲突互斥，而是交织互补：1）本体论层面上，人类具有超越文化差异的基础道德关怀 ( basic moralconcern )、多样的关怀，例如关爱、互惠、公平、权威等等；2）个体发生学层面上，具有普遍意义的基础道德在童年期表现为儿童的道德直觉，由多重社会认知机制支撑，这些认知机制源自解决不同类型问题或者调节不同社会关系的动机需求，儿童从小就习得如何在具体情境下处理不同道德关怀之间的次序甚至矛盾；3）教育层面上，培养道德品质、将儿童塑造成具有社会价值的成员，是所有社会的共同教育目标；但不同时空的社群在对道德发展的理解、理想价值观、社会化实践等维度上存在显著差异( Xu, 2019: 657; Xu,2024: 17-18 )。
不管道德心理学还是道德人类学，其理论源流依然囿于西方中心论，因此我的研究带着对目前流行理论概念的反思，联结汉学关于 “人伦教化” 的思想脉络和鲜活田野所发现的儿童经验世界，来讨论中国文化语境下的道德发展，凸显儿童的认知主体性。汉学人类学长久以来所流行的“育儿 / 社会化”研究范式 ( childtraining / socialization ) 其实是一种自上而下、对儿童的凝视，重点在于成年人育儿理念和策略，并不在于儿童自身的体验。这种范式既与将儿童心智视作黑匣子或者白板的社会科学思路相关，也反映出中国道德思想脉络，“尤其是儒家思想将 ‘孝道’ 和纵向家庭关系 ( 父子轴、母 子轴 ) 置于首位，将儿童视为中国道德教化和家庭伦理的承接器皿、视为伦 理话语的投射对象，以建构出 ‘纯真儿童’ 的原型意象” （ 许晶，2023:76 ）。我的研究则聚焦儿童认知，探讨儿童如何主动习得道德知识和建构伦理规范，而不是被动接受教导。
我第一本书 The Good Child ( Xu 2017 )( 中译本《 培养好孩子 》) 以及相关论文出自 2010 年代在上海一个幼儿园的田野研究。本书探讨价值体系变迁、家长焦虑重重的时代下，儿童如何应对复杂的教育信息，习得公平、互惠、同理心、等级权威等道德知识与情感。我发现儿童的实际认知与他们所接受的明确教导之间存在张力，例如他们的分享并非基于集体主义式、人人平等的教导，而反映出个体互惠的考量；儿童对基础道德关怀的理解又体现出他们对具体社会秩序和和文化观念的敏感，例如他们对互惠的理解渗透着人情关系的文化影响；他们对 “表现好” 这一道德话语的习得让我反思西方理论所强调的公平观念（ 横向道德秩序 ），看到中国文化土壤深厚的等级权威观念（ 纵向道德秩序 ）（ 详细综述见许晶，2020 ）。第二本书 “Unruly” Children ( Xu, 2024 ) 则将研究视角从当代全球化大都市转向 1950 年代末台北盆地的传统汉人社会，书中主角从排排坐 “表现好” 的幼儿园小朋友变成村子里奔跑嬉笑的孩子们。这本书虽然内容是分析前辈人类学家武雅士所遗留下来经典田野资料，写作意图却不仅仅是重构已消逝的童年历史和被遮蔽的学术历史，更希望重新看见儿童。有别于大众所熟知的 “顺服”、“听话” 等教育理念，田野材料中浮现的却是与家长顶嘴周旋，或者阳奉阴违、戏谑大人的顽童意象，让我反思何谓 “传统汉人家庭”。主标题，打引号的 “‘ 任性’儿童”，承载着本书的核心论点：从成年人视角出发，我看到的是屡屡违逆指令的儿童，但当我将眼光转向儿童视角，特别是聚焦于儿童与同伴之间的玩耍互动，我看到的则是与 “任性 ( unruly )” 相对的秩序景象：孩子们达成合作、解决冲突、也在合作与冲突的中间地带逡巡嬉闹、建构出自己小世界的准则规范。
遇见 “ ‘任性’ 的儿童” 为我理解道德发展打开了新的研究方向。我看到亲子互动的谜之问题：惩罚为何无效？尽管打架的孩子会受到父母严厉惩罚，尽管孩子们会在美国人类学家武雅士面前给出 “（ 打架 ）不还手” 的正确答案，尽管他们在心理测试中看到打架的画面会说出 “男孩打架以后会变成流氓” 这样的话，这些批评惩罚却没有立竿见影的效果。如果我们将儿童视作认知主体，那惩罚过程就不是机械的 “刺激-反应”，而是复杂的信息交互。回到前文所述的 “关联理论”，孩子会揣测大人惩罚的意图，会评价惩罚是否正当，会感到羞辱或者愤怒，而不只是惧怕。在田野资料中品味出儿童在被惩罚过程中的情绪体验和沟通推理，不仅给我带来研究的灵感，也提醒我作为母亲教养孩子的时候应该更多自省。我看到同伴学习的重要性，也是儿童作为认知主体的一部分：从西方道德发展理论到中国思想脉络都比较重视纵轴式的教育关系（ 成人与儿童 ）、自上而下的道德教化，而这本新书则凸显儿童世界的横轴关系，同伴群体和兄弟姐妹。小孩子们一起干活，一起玩耍，一起八卦，一起发明自己的游戏规则，也一起戏谑成年人世界的怪现象，例如模仿节庆游行时倒着走路的神明，模仿警察抓赌博，模仿大人们酒后推搡，模仿主人们抢着招待客人，来回拉扯。我看到人类智能的奥秘：儿童玩耍的世界风趣幽默，他们运用创造力将丰富的文化意涵重新编码，重新情境化，赋予新的属于他们自己的意义。当我用前沿的大语言模型来系统分析一千六百多则自然观察文本时，我发现高效高速的人工智能算法面对这些嬉戏与想象交织的时刻，并不能很好解读儿童创造的意义谜宫。我期待未来的研究继续以伦理道德为窗口，探索儿童认知主体性与人工智能的关系。
结语
1950 年，“人工智能之父” 图灵在其名篇 《 计算机器与智能 》 中如此设想：“可以推测，孩子的大脑就像是从文具店买来的笔记本，内部机制很少，但有大量空白的页面”； “与其试图编写程序来模拟成人的心智，何不尝试创造一个模拟儿童心智的程序？如果随后对其施以适当的教育过程，我们就能获得成人的大脑 ( Turing 1950 ) 。大半个世纪过去了，认知科学与计算科学的融汇已经催生出强大的人工智能体，人工智能研究者正在与发展心理学家携手，从儿童学习的视角破解智能的奥秘，例如用一个孩子 61 小时日常音视频数据，而不是海量互联网数据，训练机器学习算法，词汇习得效果显著 ( Vong et al. 2024 )。尽管如此，真正意义上模拟儿童心智的程序尚未问世。儿童大脑显然不是图灵所设想的“空白笔记本”，可我们对儿童心智发展谜之初始条件和复杂学习机制还知之甚少，换言之，我们对于儿童认知主体性的理解还只是冰山一角。
心理学家用机器学习、强化学习的 “探索-利用权衡（ Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff ）” 框架来比拟儿童与成年人智能 / 算法之区别：前者是探索性学习，向未知可能性敞开，未必立即带来最佳回报；后者是利用性学习，利用已有知识做出决策，以期实现短期收益最大化 ( Gopnik 2020 ) 。2016年国际婴儿研究会议（ ICIS ）的主旨演讲，至今仍刻在我脑子里。纽约大学 Karen Adolph 教授研究婴儿学步，意识到当研究者走出 “实验室” 的思维，看到更奇妙的婴儿世界：若以成年人的标准，基于控制实验发现婴儿步行是 “利用性学习”，婴儿行走是因为前方有吸引他们的东西，他们行走按照最短最有效的模式，他们行走目标明确。然而，当研究者撤掉人为的实验室装置以后，才发现婴儿步行时常漫无目的， 很可能目光从一个地方换到另一个地方，行走的路径复杂无序；哪怕就在一个空空如也、毫无目标物品的房间，他们也步行不停。当研究者走出实验室，采用头部摄像头跟踪记录儿童自然状态下的步行时，或者用我的话说，俯身进入儿童视角，看到婴儿们用自己的眼睛、自己的脚丫子、自己的身体在开放地感知这世界。他们为学习而学习，探索精神一往无前。
漫长的童年期是人类获得的馈赠, 儿童是存在与生成 ( being and becoming )、现在时与将来时的奇妙共生体。面对十四岁儿子的灵魂拷问，我庆幸他曾经有过自由感知世界、未被短期目标框住的童年。回望我见证过的那些谜一样的奇境，那些物我两忘的瞬间，心灵为之颤动：孩子在小提琴音符变幻里感受到出神的美，为蜜蜂马蜂小草小树的生命而惊奇，盯着白墙上水波荡漾 …… 还有，近乎神性的瞬间 ( a divinemoment )：孩子很小很小的时候，他坐在距离我一两米之外的床上，我在对着电脑写论文。我不经意撇过头往他的方向看，突然与他视线相遇。小婴儿在注视我，目光里有说不出来的温柔好奇、静谧的欣喜和全然信任，生命原初的爱。那一刹那，星辰闪烁。孩子爱的凝视里，隐藏着任何算法无以破解的奥秘。
1 ：2023年九月华东师范大学社会工作系方法论课程讲座笔记。
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参考文献：
许晶，2020，《 道德从何而来: 心理认知人类学视野下的儿童道德发展研究 》，《 社会学评论 》 第 4 期，第 3 ~ 19 页。
许晶，2021，《 培养好孩子:道德与儿童发展 》，祝宇清译，许晶审订，上海:华东师范大学出版社。
许晶，2023，《 重新发现 “儿童” ：对武雅士经典田野资料的再阐释 》，《 社会学评论 》 第 5 期，第 65 ~88 页。
Gopnik, Alison. 2010. The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. First Edition. New York: Picador.
———. 2020. “Childhood as a Solution to Explore–Exploit Tensions.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375 ( 1803 ): 20190502.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0502.
Gweon, Hyowon, and Peter Zhu. 2024. “Where Is the Baby in Core Knowledge?” Behavioral and BrainSciences 47 (January):e129.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X2300314X.
Hirschfeld, Lawrence A. 2002. “Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children?” American Anthropologist 104 (2): 611–27.
https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2002.104.2.611.
Lew-Levy, Sheina, and Dorsa Amir. 2024. “Children as Agents of Cultural Adaptation.” Behavioral andBrain Sciences, December, 1–68.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X24001377.
Miller, George A. 2003. “The Cognitive Revolution: A Historical Perspective.” Trends in CognitiveSciences 7 (3): 141–44.
https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00029-9.
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1996. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2 edition. Oxford ;Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Suzuki, Shinichi, and Waltraud Suzuki. 1993. Nurtured by Love: The Classic Approach to Talent Education. 2nd ed. edition. Alfred Music.
Turing, Alan. 1950. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” Mind 59 (236): 433–60.
https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/lix.236.433.
Wellman, Henry M. 2014. Making Minds: How Theory of Mind Develops. 1st edition. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press.
Xu, Jing. 2017. The Good Child: Moral Development in a Chinese Preschool. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
http://ww.sup.org/books/title/?id=26737.
———. 2019. “Learning ‘Merit’ in a Chinese Preschool: Bringing the Anthropological Perspective to Understanding Moral Development.” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 655–66.
https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13269.
———. 2024. ‘Unruly’ Children: Historical Fieldnotes and Learning Morality in a Taiwan Village. New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/unruly-children/FFB0A664310D4F8330B3FFE3CA09A21D.
Yanaoka, Kaichi, Laura E. Michaelson, Ryan Mori Guild, Grace Dostart, Jade Yonehiro, Satoru Saito, and Yuko Munakata. 2022. “Cultures Crossing: The Power of Habit in Delaying Gratification.” Psychological Science 33 (7): 1172–81.
https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221074650.
Seeing Children as Cognitive Agents
Xu Jing
Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, USA
Abstract: Seeing Children as Cognitive Agents argues a shift from viewing children as passive recipients/objects to recognizing them as active reasoners and meaning-makers. Combining auto-ethnographic vignettes (a mother–son dialogue on the value of education and violin learning), reinterpretations of classic Sinophone ethnography, and cross-cultural developmental tasks (including a cultural reframing of the Marshmallow Test), the paper advances a simultaneously universalistic and pluralistic account of children’s learning and moral development grounded in cognitive anthropology. Key claims: (1) In real contexts children are subjects and interlocutors—they read intentions, negotiate meanings, and thus require methods and pedagogy that honor situatedness and intersubjectivity; (2) Peer interaction and play form the horizontal axis of moral and cultural learning; punitive effects hinge on children’s inferences about legitimacy and relational order rather than linear stimulus–response; (3) Cultural practices can redefine experimental measures, warning against confounding habit with ability; (4) Aesthetic wonder fuels the explore–exploit engine, urging curricula and school governance to preserve exploratory space and grant substantive participation in decisions; (5) Current large language models struggle to capture children’s creative meaning-making in play/symbolic action. Methodologically, the paper includes children in knowledge co-production; practically, it proposes a “bend-down/stand-up” posture for teachers and child-participatory decision-making, offering implications for educational research, curriculum design, and human–AI dialogue.
Keywords: cognitive anthropology; children as agents; moral development; intersubjectivity; peer learning; explore–exploit trade-off; cross-cultural experiments; child participation in education
https://doi.org/10.64053/PYHG2600
A Soul-Searching Question
In early September 2024, my fourteen-year-old son returned to the United States after spending his summer vacation in China. One early autumn evening in Seattle, surrounded by verdant pines and cypresses, I took a walk with my son to talk about his trip. He suddenly asked me, “Mom, you got into Tsinghua University. Why did you come to America? Who in Seattle ( meaning, ordinary Americans ) has even heard of Tsinghua? ( The implication being, who in China hasn’t heard of Tsinghua? )” This sudden, soul-searching question struck me like a sudden blow. I stood there, stunned, pondering why he would ask this and how I should respond. This child, who had grown up with a great deal of freedom in Seattle, had experienced a profound cultural, and even existential, shock during a short one-month trip back to China. He knew little about American university rankings, yet he had already sensed what Tsinghua University means to parents and students in China and had felt the pressure of its educational competition. He saw how young children were busy and exhausted even during their summer break, and he confided in me: “Mom, I only want to go back to China for vacation in the future, not for school. For a while ( during my time in China ), I was a bit confused about the purpose of life.” It was only then that I understood what was really troubling him: he was astonished to discover that getting into Peking University or Tsinghua University was the ultimate goal for so many families in China.
I tried to answer him: “When I was young, I did think getting into Tsinghua was very important. But is getting into a good university the only value in life? No, I don’t see it that way anymore. Life is vast. Regardless of which school you attend, life will be filled with many hardships and sorrows, but it will also have many joys that have nothing to do with what university you went to.” I then turned the question back to him: “Is your life right now meaningful and filled with hope?” He answered, very naturally, “Yes.” My son’s soul-searching question points directly to the value of education, and even the meaning of life itself.
For a long time, it has been I who has been gazing at my child, from his birth to his growth into a happy and confident teenager. Yet, a simple conversation in our ordinary life made me realize that I was also being seen by him. Children have, in fact, always been cognitive agents —— active agents endowed with a powerful capacity to learn, perceive, think, understand, and construct knowledge. Every child is a unique individual who connects with the surrounding world through their own mind and emotions. As a mother, like the vast majority of parents, I am beset by parental anxiety at all times and in all places: What is the purpose of education? What constitutes a good education? Is there a single best theory of parenting? Can we design our children’s growth? Parental anxiety largely stems from a top-down posture that treats children as objects to be viewed and molded. While the value of education is a matter of opinion, the process of seeing children as cognitive agents, which I have gradually come to in the interweaving of my research and parenting, has had a therapeutic effect on me. For this reason, I am grateful for the opportunity to study children, especially from the perspective of cognitive anthropology, which lies at the intersection of anthropology and cognitive science. From anthropological fieldwork to psychological experiments, from contemporary China to diverse cultural contexts across time and space, from being an observer to a parent, I am constantly awed by the creativity of children. The world of a child’s mind draws me in like a magnetic field, for it holds the secret of what it means to be human. With this humble essay, I wish to look back on my intertwined journey of parenting and research, introduce my interdisciplinary scholarly path and analytical cases, and see children as the cognitive agents they are.
Wonder and Awe
The year my son was born, I was a doctoral student in anthropology, also taking courses in developmental psychology. I personally experienced the mutual illumination of fieldwork and theory. I sporadically documented moments from my son’s infancy, marveling at the miracle of a small life’s growth. The most interesting part of parenting is not how we teach, but how we learn — learning to lower ourselves to see the world through a child’s eyes. Not long after my son was born, I was giving him a bath one day when I noticed he was staring quietly at the white wall opposite him. The ripples in the bathwater were casting fantastical light and shadows on the wall, and he was mesmerized. We had a picture of a duckling in our home, and I would often hold him and hum “The Little Yellow Duck” song, sometimes pointing to the picture. One day, when he was a few months old, as I said the words “little yellow duck,” his gaze suddenly shifted to the picture. He had established a logical connection between a linguistic sign, an external object, and his mother’s communicative cues.
These moments are like flashes of insight. An infant’s gaze opens a window for the researcher into the pre-linguistic human mind. Many psychological experiments explore an infant’s innate knowledge, learning mechanisms, and cognitive development by measuring their looking time or analyzing how they align their gaze with adults and share attention and intentionality in social scenes. When I took my one-year-old son to the supermarket, my eyes saw only household goods. But this little person, walking unsteadily from his own height, spotted a large ball—his favorite toy—on the bottom shelf of an aisle. He pulled me along, pointing at the ball, his eyes fixed on that single object. A child has their own perspective, one that is not the same as my own accustomed view. That scene left a deep impression on me. When my son was six, he came home from school, and as usual, I asked him what he did that day. He said very seriously, “A flytrap!” and then vividly described two different flytrap devices he had heard about from a friend. In a day of school, what I cared about was what the teacher had taught in class; for him, the highlight was the flytrap, or rather, the novel things he had heard from his friends. The next morning, he woke up and couldn’t wait to tell me the difference between bees and wasps — a bee stings once and sacrifices itself, while a wasp can sting a hundred times and be fine. It was as if he had discovered a new continent, and this, too, was something he had heard from a friend. My adult brain had almost never processed information about flytraps, bees, or wasps, but the eager look in my son’s eyes showed that the world he cared about was not the same as the world I took for granted. Perhaps understanding the world as a child sees it is the very beginning of education.
The journey of accompanying my son as he learned music, however, truly opened my eyes and gave me a profound insight into what good education is. I still vividly remember the first time I took him for a trial violin lesson. At five and a half, he was sensitive and shy. Walking down the narrow hallway, he hugged me and said, “Mommy, I’m scared.” I asked, “What are you scared of, sweetie?” He said timidly, “I’m scared I won’t play the violin well.” I had never learned the violin and couldn’t empathize, so I could only offer platitudes and abstract reassurances: “I know you’re afraid of not doing well, but with anything, if you practice seriously, you can learn it well. Like when you didn’t know how to ride a two-wheel bike, but Grandma took you to practice every day, and you learned, right?” He nodded with a glimmer of understanding, his small hand gripping mine tightly. At the door to the classroom, we heard a medley of sounds —some melodious and skilled, others the scraping noises of a beginner. I said, “Look, sweetie, there’s another child who is just starting and can’t play well either. But if you keep practicing, you’ll sound as good as that other music, right?” On the door of the teacher’s studio was a quote from the Japanese music educator Shinichi Suzuki, which was also the teacher’s educational creed: “When love is deep, much can be accomplished“. I am mentally preparing myself for the five-year-old mind. I want to come down to their physical limitations and up to their sense of wonder and awe” ( Suzuki and Suzuki 1993 ). While the Suzuki method receives mixed reviews in academic circles, these words moved me deeply, humbling me to “see” the child.
When we entered the studio and met the teacher, my impression was excellent. She was an elderly woman with a full head of silver hair, who spoke slowly and was gentle and patient with children. I asked her how a restless little boy could learn an instrument as difficult as the violin. The teacher smiled warmly and said, “I especially love teaching children. It’s truly marvelous. You have no idea how much potential a small child has!” And so, we embarked on a new journey.
This teacher had taught many young boys, including some who were quite rambunctious. As a beginner’s violin teacher, her first principle was not to stifle her students’ interest. She rarely criticized them and had no strict requirements for practice time, instead tailoring her approach to each child, nurturing their feeling for music. Every lesson, I could feel the teacher’s love for music education and her affection for the children, which perfectly matched the “When love is deep” motto on her door. A year later, the teacher taught a new practice piece, and my son loved it. I asked him why he liked it ( as it seemed to be a rather tedious exercise ). He explained that he liked how the melody had dramatic highs and lows and different speeds. I was astonished: where did this little boy, who only knew how to play with his Transformers, get such a nuanced and natural feel for music? Halfway through a lesson, the teacher asked him, “I think that’s enough for today, shall we stop here?” My son shook his head, saying he wanted to finish learning the whole piece. The teacher followed his lead and continued. I watched him practice closely; he was so focused on every new fingering, every note, every rhythm. He was mobilizing his entire mind to analyze, recognize, and generate new moments of understanding. His eyes were fixed on the fingerboard, his long, dark eyelashes resting like butterflies, each instant as beautiful as an oil painting. On that day, I saw that his inner motor had started, and he had entered a beautiful new world. I am grateful we found such a good teacher. My son has now been learning the violin for nearly ten years, and his love for music has only grown. He will pull me over to appreciate a piece he loves, or tell me how listening to Mahler’s 5th Symphony gives him a sense of awe that transcends the tangible world and defies words. I envy him for having such a passion, a constant emotional outlet for all the joys and sorrows he will face in life. In contrast, some school subjects fail to spark his interest at all, and I cannot force him; after all, he must walk his own path in life. Even though I have only raised one child, I have seen how distinct a child’s individual will can be, and I have gradually come to understand Shinichi Suzuki’s words: to “rise up, and follow their sense of wonder and awe for the world.”
Cross-Disciplinary Dialogue
Seeing children as cognitive agents and following their wondrous mental worlds—this perspective stems from my understanding of child development and continues to nourish my research, shaping my academic trajectory of exploring the world of children beyond disciplinary divides. Mainstream social sciences, including anthropology, do not pay much attention to child cognition. There was even a widely circulated paper titled “Why Don’t Anthropologists Like Children?” ( Hirschfeld 2002 ). Although children are crucial to understanding core anthropological questions like “what it means to be human” and “cultural acquisition,” mainstream anthropologists have paid little attention to children’s cognitive abilities and developmental mechanisms, and have overlooked the significance of child cognitive development for understanding society and culture. Even in educational anthropology, most research focuses on “parenting,” emphasizing educational systems, philosophies, and strategies, rather than on understanding the rich inner world of thought and emotion of the child.
Many anthropologists hold outdated, pre-cognitive science biases about child cognition. One is a behaviorist bias, which treats the child’s mind as a black box and focuses only on external environmental stimuli and behavioral responses, without needing to consider the complex mechanisms of information processing in the brain. Another is an extreme constructivist bias, which treats the child’s mind as a blank slate ( tabula rasa ) to be shaped by the environment ( Xu, 2024: 15 ). In the discourse of social science, the child is merely a product of the environment, which includes social structures, cultural ideas, and political-economic systems.
Cognitive anthropology emerged from the “cognitive revolution” of the mid-20th century, which opened up the black box of the human mind ( Miller 2003 ). It regards the mind and cognition as fundamental to understanding human behavior and social culture, and thus places special importance on child development. This field lies at the intersection of anthropology and psychology, placing the interface between social culture and individual cognition under a theoretical spotlight. It both studies psychological mechanisms and maintains anthropology’s cross-cultural perspective and reflexive spirit, which has become the theoretical direction I have dedicated myself to ( Xu, 2020 ). From the perspective of cognitive anthropology, children are not the objects of education, but its protagonists. Humans have a long childhood, and children are unprecedented learners on this planet. It could be said that learning is a child’s nature. Children demonstrate strong agency in language acquisition and in constructing their knowledge systems of the biological and physical worlds, which is what makes education in these domains possible. My research focuses on children’s social cognition — that is, how children understand social roles, cultural customs, moral norms, and so on. When we talk about the transmission and evolution of human culture, most research focuses on the role of adults. Yet, the fact that humans have been able to accumulate such a wealth of social and cultural knowledge, and that our species has even managed to thrive, is inseparable from the learning capacity of children themselves ( Lew-Levy and Amir 2024 ).
Children’s learning is active — they proactively explore the world rather than passively receiving information ( Gweon and Zhu 2024 ); it is reflective — children, like scientists, can constantly reflect on and revise their knowledge systems ( Gopnik 2010 ); and it is intentional — humans can act based on intended goals from infancy and also develop the ability to understand others’ intentions ( Wellman 2014 ) ( Xu, 2020 ).
Twenty years ago, I happened to watch a Chinese documentary, Kindergarten, which recorded the daily life of a boarding kindergarten in Wuhan. The words and actions of the children, seemingly naive, were also thought-provoking, and I was inspired with the idea of studying children. For example, in one scene, a female adult from the film crew ( let’s call her “Auntie” ) is talking to a little boy:
Auntie: “Who is your favorite classmate in your class?”
Boy: “A girl?”
Auntie: “Yes.”
Boy: “Umm… I don’t know…” ( hesitantly and shyly )
Auntie: “You don’t know? I think you like someone but you’re afraid to say.” ( smiling as she asks )
Boy: “How can you tell?”
Auntie: “I can just tell. You hesitated for a long time. I probably even know who it is, the one in white.”
Boy: “If you already know, why are you still asking me?”
I have shown this clip in lectures at universities in China, and the students always smile in knowing agreement. Some students told me they saw the influence of the cultural context in this brief exchange: “Even if there is a relatively strong bond of trust between the interviewer and the child, in the Chinese cultural context — where young children are not supposed to have crushes and where Chinese people are generally shy about discussing feelings — the little boy still chose to hide ( his thoughts ).” Other students saw the mutual interpretation between the researcher and the research subject in this specific research setting: “In that situation, the child hesitates in his response, and the interviewer observes the child’s hesitation and then infers why the child is hesitating.” This short clip showed me that: 1) Children in their preschool years have already developed the ability to perceive and infer the thoughts and feelings of others, a capacity known in cognitive science as “Theory of Mind” ( To M ), which is the foundation of rich human social cognition. To understand the developmental mechanisms of child cognition requires systematic knowledge and rigorous methods from psychology. 2) A child’s mental world is deeply influenced by their socio-cultural environment; how society and culture shape an individual’s lifeworld is a domain of anthropological research. 3) Moreover, the epistemology and methodology of anthropology emphasize the situational knowledge and the intersubjectivity between the researcher and the researched. The researcher and the subject, each with their own complex systems of meaning, power positions, life experiences, and communicative intentions, engage with each other in a specific context.
Twenty years later, looking back at this clip from Kindergarten, I realize that the interdisciplinary approach of cognitive anthropology has not only helped me explore theoretical questions about how child cognitive development interacts with the socio-cultural environment, but has also inspired me to pursue deeper epistemological questions about how knowledge about child development is produced. For example, the “Relevance Theory” co-authored by French cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber and British linguist Deirdre Wilson (1996) provides a philosophical framework that transcends disciplinary boundaries and highlights human cognitive agency. Viewing my research field through the lens of Relevance Theory, whether it is anthropological fieldwork or controlled psychological experiments, the knowledge we produce about children is the result of interpersonal communicative interaction. The researcher and the subject mutually interpret each other in a specific behavioral context and within a multi-layered system of meaning, making cognitive inferences about each other’s communicative intent to find the relevance between utterances/communicative signals and the context. It is not just adults; children, too, participate as cognitive agents in this process of interpretation, inference, and communication. In the Kindergarten interview scene, for instance, the little boy tries to find the relevance between the interviewer’s verbal cues and the context and to infer her intention, which leads to his puzzlement: Why are you asking what you already know?
Regarding epistemological questions, in my new book, ‘Unruly’ Children ( Xu 2024 ), I emphasize that a child’s active ability to “read faces and interpret moods” has a significant impact on fieldwork results, and may even be the foundation that makes ethnography possible. In other words, through the lens of the child, I rediscovered the inner texture of ethnographic practice and writing. This new book is a re-examination of classic ethnographic materials from Sinophone anthropology. In the late 1950s, anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf conducted more than two years of fieldwork in a Han Chinese village in the Taipei Basin. It was the first ethnographic study in the Euro-American academic world to focus on Han Chinese children. They collected a large amount of data, including interviews, observations, and psychological tests, but for various reasons, they never completed a systematic analysis of this material ( Xu, 2023 ). My reinterpretation of this material focuses on the children’s rich social cognition, because all the texts are the result of communicative interactions between the local children and the various researchers. Taking children’s fights as an example: when Margery Wolf administered a questionnaire in the local primary school, a key question was about fighting. Assuming they were bullied by a peer, how would the children react? The children’s chosen answers were not to react or not to fight back, because they had been taught from a young age that children should not fight.
However, in a different context, when Margery Wolf’s research assistant interviewed the children in the village and asked the same question, many of the children said they would fight back, “an eye for an eye,” and would not hesitate to act when necessary, without regard for the “correct answer.” The same question elicited starkly different answers, reflecting the children’s sensitivity to the research context, the researcher’s identity, and their intentions. In the children’s eyes, the American anthropologist Margery Wolf was a strange foreigner whom they dared not approach. They feared her in person but nicknamed her “big-nosed one” behind her back. When filling out her questionnaire in the formal atmosphere of the classroom where only Mandarin was allowed, the children obediently gave the correct answers. But the teenage local research assistant, whom the children called “Big Sister Chen,” was a playmate they were close to. They spoke to her in their mother tongue ( Minnan) , so they did not mind revealing their true feelings and described events in vivid detail. Ultimately, when we study children, children are also studying us. I chose a photograph taken by Arthur Wolf of children playing as the cover for my book, because this picture captures the moment when the gazes of the researcher/photographer and the research subjects meet — their mutual seeing.
It is not just anthropological ethnography that needs to consider the intersubjectivity between children and researchers. Psychological research, known for its controlled experiments, also faces the problem of interpreting meaning. Children are not just “subjects” but also “interlocutors.” Their verbal and nonverbal behaviors in an experiment reflect their cultural knowledge and their understanding of the research situation ( Xu 2019 ). Take the classic study in developmental psychology, the Marshmallow Test, for example. The experiment assesses a child’s capacity for delayed gratification ( the ability to resist an immediate impulse for a greater reward ) by testing whether they will wait for a second marshmallow instead of eating the one in front of them. Recently, cross-cultural comparative research has led scholars to reconsider the meaning of this experiment. For instance, in the same experimental procedure, Japanese children show a longer delay of gratification time when waiting for a marshmallow reward. However, when the reward is changed to a wrapped gift, American children’s waiting time exceeds that of Japanese children. The results do not reflect a difference in the children’s abilities but rather a difference in cultural habits. In Japan, waiting to eat is an important pre-meal ritual. In the United States, delaying the opening of gifts is a common cultural practice at occasions like Christmas or birthday parties ( Yanaoka et al. 2022 ). My collaborators and I have also found subtle cultural differences in our ongoing experimental research. In one task, we show participating children a few simple body movements and then ask them to imitate them. Some Chinese-American children in Seattle hesitate, trying to guess which movement is the “correct” one, or they perform the movement they are best at, as if the experiment is a test by an authority figure. This is related to the educational culture they have been immersed in since a young age, and possibly also to my identity as a Chinese-American adult. In contrast, children from the Republic of the Congo are shy to imitate, because in their tribal culture, body movements ( dance ) are a collective ritual, not an individual performance. What knowledge, norms, and expectations a child brings into an experimental setting, what kind of researcher they interact with, and how they interact all determine whether a psychological experiment is truly measuring the intended concept and to what extent it achieves its measurement goals. When children are seen as cognitive agents, psychological experiments and ethnographic fieldwork are, in a sense, two sides of the same coin.
Moral Development
Moral capacity is one of the mysteries of humanity; the complexity of human group morality far exceeds that of the animal world. However, on the topic of moral development, anthropology and psychology have followed divergent paths, each with its own limitations. Psychology focuses on individual psychological mechanisms and holds strongly universalistic assumptions about humanity and morality. Anthropology, on the other hand, critiques decontextualized, universal moral reasoning, focusing instead on people in diverse and specific structures, institutions, and discourses and their ethical practices shaped by their lifeworlds. In the 21st century, empirical research in cognitive science has discovered that human moral knowledge and emotions emerge in infancy, making child development a crucial direction for studying human moral psychology. Meanwhile, the body of thought on morality and ethics that has emerged in anthropology over the past two decades has largely ignored the dimension of child development, thereby obscuring the child as a cognitive agent ( Xu, 2020 ).
My research attempts to build a bridge between anthropology and psychology, to promote a theoretical dialogue between cognition and culture. Based on the epistemology of ethnographic fieldwork, I integrate multiple methods — including interviews, observation, questionnaires, psychological experiments, computational text analysis, and behavioral modeling — to understand children’s moral development and learning. My research advocates for a new theoretical orientation, one in which moral development and learning are simultaneously universalistic and pluralistic. These two aspects are not contradictory but are interwoven and complementary. 1) At the ontological level, humans share basic moral concerns that transcend cultural differences, such as care, reciprocity, fairness, and authority. 2) At the ontogenetic level, these universal basic moral concerns manifest in childhood as moral intuitions, supported by multiple social-cognitive mechanisms. These cognitive mechanisms originate from the motivational need to solve different types of problems or to regulate different social relationships. From a young age, children learn to manage the order and even the contradictions between different moral concerns in specific situations. 3) At the educational level, different communities across time and space show significant variation in their understanding of moral development, their ideal values, and their socialization practices ( Xu, 2019: 657; Xu, 2024: 17-18 ).
Whether in moral psychology or moral anthropology, the theoretical lineages remain rooted in Western-centric thought. Therefore, my research carries a reflexive stance toward current theoretical concepts. It connects intellectual threads from Sinology about “moral cultivation” ( renlun jiaohua ) with the vibrant child experiences discovered through fieldwork to discuss moral development in a Chinese cultural context, highlighting the cognitive agency of children. The “child training/socialization” research paradigm, long prevalent in Sinophone anthropology, is in fact a top-down gaze at the child, focusing on adult parenting philosophies and strategies, not on the child’s own experience. This paradigm is related not only to the social science approach that views the child’s mind as a black box or a blank slate but also reflects the lineage of Chinese moral thought, “especially Confucian thought, which places ‘filial piety’ and vertical family relationships ( the father-son axis, the mother-son axis ) at the forefront, viewing the child as the vessel for Chinese moral cultivation and family ethics, and as the object onto which ethical discourse is projected, in order to construct the archetype of the ‘innocent child’” ( Xu, 2023: 76 ). My research, in contrast, focuses on child cognition, exploring how children actively acquire moral knowledge and construct ethical norms, rather than passively receiving instruction.
My first book, The Good Child ( Xu 2017 ), and its related publications are based on fieldwork in a Shanghai kindergarten in the 2010s. The book explores how, in an era of shifting value systems and intense parental anxiety, children handle complex educational messages and acquire moral knowledge and emotions related to fairness, reciprocity, empathy, and hierarchical authority. I found a tension between what children actually know and the explicit instruction they receive. For example, their sharing is not based on a collectivist, egalitarian principle, but rather reflects considerations of individual reciprocity. Children’s understanding of basic moral concerns also shows their sensitivity to specific social orders and cultural concepts. For instance, their understanding of reciprocity is permeated by the cultural influence of renqing ( human feeling/social connections ). Their acquisition of the moral discourse of “behaving well” led me to reflect on the concept of fairness ( a horizontal moral order ) emphasized in Western theory and to see the deeply rooted concept of hierarchical authority ( a vertical moral order ) in the soil of Chinese culture ( for a detailed review, see Xu, 2020 ). My second book, ‘Unruly’ Children ( Xu, 2024 ), shifts the research perspective from a modern global metropolis to a traditional Han Chinese society in the Taipei Basin of the late 1950s. The protagonists of the book change from kindergarten children sitting in neat rows “behaving well” to children running and laughing in a village. Although this book analyzes the classic fieldwork data left behind by the senior anthropologists Arthur and Margery Wolf, my intention in writing it was not just to reconstruct a vanished childhood history and an obscured academic history, but more importantly, to see children anew.
In contrast to the widely known educational ideals of “obedience” and “being good,” what emerges from the fieldwork materials is the image of the “unruly” child who talks back to parents, feigns compliance while acting in defiance, and teases adults. This led me to reflect on what constitutes a “traditional Han Chinese family.” The main title, ‘Unruly’ Children ( with “unruly” in quotation marks ), carries the book’s core argument: from an adult’s perspective, I see children who repeatedly defy instructions, but when I shift my gaze to the child’s perspective, especially focusing on the playful interactions among children, I see a scene of order that contrasts with “unruliness.” Children reach agreements, resolve conflicts, and in the space between cooperation and conflict, they linger and play, constructing the rules and norms of their own small world.
Encountering the “unruly” child opened a new research direction for my understanding of moral development. I saw the perplexing question of parent-child interaction: why is punishment ineffective? Although children who fight are severely punished by their parents, although they give the “correct” answer of not fighting back to the American anthropologist Margery Wolf, and although in psychological tests they say that a “boy who fights will become a hooligan,” these criticisms and punishments have no immediate effect. If we see the child as a cognitive agent, then the process of punishment is not a mechanical “stimulus-response,” but a complex exchange of information. Returning to the “Relevance Theory” mentioned earlier, a child will try to infer the adult’s intention behind the punishment, evaluate whether the punishment is just, and may feel shame or anger, not just fear. Savoring the children’s emotional experiences and communicative reasoning during the process of being punished in the fieldwork data not only gave me research inspiration but also reminded me to be more self-reflective as a mother raising my own child. I saw the importance of peer learning, which is also part of the child’s cognitive agency. From Western theories of moral development to the intellectual traditions of China, the emphasis has been on the vertical axis of educational relationships (adult and child) and top-down moral cultivation. This new book, however, highlights the horizontal relationships of the child’s world: peer groups and siblings. Children work together, play together, gossip together, invent their own games together, and also mock the strange phenomena of the adult world together — for example, by imitating the gods who walk backwards in festival processions, imitating police raiding a gambling den, imitating adults shoving each other after drinking, or imitating hosts fighting over who gets to treat a guest, pulling each other back and forth. I saw the secret of human intelligence: the world of children’s play is witty and humorous. They use their creativity to recode rich cultural meanings, re-contextualize them, and give them new meanings that belong to them. When I used a cutting-edge large language model to systematically analyze more than 1,600 naturalistic observation texts, I found that even this highly efficient and high-speed artificial intelligence algorithm, when faced with these moments interwoven with play and imagination, could not well decipher the enigma of the children’s creative meaning-making. I look forward to future research that continues to use moral ethics as a window to explore the cognitive agency of children and its relationship with artificial intelligence.
Conclusion
In 1950, Alan Turing, the “father of artificial intelligence,” envisioned the following in his famous paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”: “It can be maintained that the child’s brain is like a notebook bought from a stationer’s, with very little mechanism in it, but plenty of blank sheets”; “Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child’s? If this were then subjected to an appropriate course of education one would hope to obtain the adult brain” ( Turing 1950 ). More than half a century has passed. The convergence of cognitive science and computer science has given rise to powerful artificial intelligence. AI researchers are now joining hands with developmental psychologists to crack the code of intelligence from the perspective of child learning. For example, using 61 hours of first-person audio-visual data from a single child, rather than massive internet datasets, a machine learning algorithm was trained and achieved remarkable results in word acquisition ( Vong et al. 2024 ). Nevertheless, a program that truly simulates the child’s mind has yet to be created. A child’s brain is clearly not the “blank notebook” Turing imagined, yet we still know very little about the initial conditions and complex learning mechanisms of the developmental puzzle that is the child’s mind. In other words, our understanding of the cognitive agency of children is still just the tip of the iceberg.
Psychologists use the “Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoff” framework from machine learning and reinforcement learning to compare the intelligence/algorithms of children and adults. The former is characterized by exploratory learning, open to unknown possibilities, which may not bring immediate optimal returns. The latter is characterized by exploitative learning, using existing knowledge to make decisions in order to maximize short-term gains ( Gopnik 2020 ). The keynote speech at the 2016 International Congress of Infant Studies ( ICIS ) is still etched in my mind. Professor Karen Adolph of New York University, who studies infant walking, realized that when researchers step out of the “laboratory” mindset, they see a more wondrous world of infants. By adult standards, based on controlled experiments, infant walking appears to be “exploitative learning.” Babies walk because there is something attractive in front of them; they walk in the shortest, most efficient pattern; their walking is goal-oriented. However, when researchers removed the artificial laboratory apparatus, they discovered that infant walking is often aimless. Their gaze might shift from one place to another; their walking paths are complex and non-linear. Even in an empty room with no objects to serve as goals, they still walk nonstop. When researchers stepped out of the lab and used head-mounted cameras to track and record children in their natural state — or, in my words, when they stooped down to enter the child’s perspective — they saw infants using their own eyes, their own feet, and their own bodies to openly perceive this world. They learn for the sake of learning, their exploratory spirit forging ever forward.
The long period of childhood is a gift to humanity. The child is a wondrous co-existence of being and becoming, of the present and the future. Faced with my fourteen-year-old son’s soul-searching question, I am glad that he once had a childhood where he could freely perceive the world, unconstrained by short-term goals. I look back at those mystery-like wonders I witnessed, those moments of being lost in the world that made my soul tremble: my son feeling an ecstatic beauty in the shifting notes of a violin, marveling at the lives of bees, wasps, grasses, and trees, staring at the ripples on a white wall… And then, there was that almost divine moment: when he was very, very small, he was sitting on the bed a few feet away from me while I was writing at my computer. I glanced over in his direction, and suddenly our eyes met. The little baby was looking at me, his gaze filled with an indescribable gentleness and curiosity, a quiet joy and complete trust, the primordial love of life. In that instant, the stars twinkled. In a child’s loving gaze lies a mystery that no algorithm can ever decipher.
References
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Xu, Jing. 2021. The Good Child: Morality and Child Development [ 培养好孩子: 道德与儿童发展 ], translated by Zhu Yuqing, edited by Xu Jing. Shanghai: East China Normal University Press.
Xu, Jing. 2023. “Rediscovering ‘Children’: A Reinterpretation of Margery Wolf’s Classic Ethnographic Materials” [ 重新发现 “儿童” :对武雅士经典田野资料的再阐释 ]. Sociological Review of China [ 社会学评论 ] (5): 65–88.
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