Young Children's Understanding of Restorative Justice

The present study investigated how young children understand the sophisticated concept of restorative justice in unintentional moral transgressions. A sex-balanced sample of 5-year-old (M = 5.67, SD = 0.34, 49.3% girls) and 8-year-old (M = 7.86, SD = 0.29, 46.0% girls) Chinese children (N = 193) participated in the study. In designing the materials, we distilled the multidimensional meanings of restorative justice into two stories, one addressing the theme of property violation and the other physical harm; both stories were set in an animal community. We then engaged the children in joint reading and an interview, during which they showed preference for the given treatments for the transgressor (two restorative treatments vs. two retributive treatments) and ranked two further sets of restorative vs. retributive treatments at the community level. The results indicated that most children favored restorative treatments over retributive treatments for a transgressor, and the 8-year-olds viewed psychological restoration more favorably and behavioral punishment less favorably than the 5-year-olds. The children also tended to endorse restorative treatments at the community level, revealing an understanding of the needs, and obligations of all parties concerned. Notably, more 8- than 5-year-olds showed a consistency in restorative orientation at this level. Interpreting our data through the lens of the Representational Redescription model, we attained a more refined account of young children's levels of understanding regarding restorative justice. These results provide insights for the early cultivation of restorative justice among young children, which is a cornerstone for its successful practice in any society.

Exaptative Thinking as What Makes Us Human

This chapter develops the theory that there are two kinds of self-organizing, self-mending, self-reproducing structures in the world. The first is living organisms. The second is complex minds, or more precisely, worldviews: ways of seeing the world and being in the world, i.e., networks of memory and knowledge that constitute the content of complex minds. The chapter explores the role played by two forms of exaptation—biological and psychological—in the perpetuation of these self-organizing structures. Biological exaptation occurs when selective environmental pressures cause the exploitation of potentiality, while psychological exaptation involves the ability to modify/change a pattern of cognition to incorporate different perspectives, thereby increasing cultural variation. While the former is associated with survival, the latter has far-reaching consequences in terms of how humans view not only the world around them, but also their own place within it. Within psychological exaptation, the difference between generic and strategic exaptation has been drawn to illustrate the unique attributes of the exaptation process in humans. Strategic exaptation operates through a process of representational redescription, reflexivity, and autocatalysis, that allows for humans to use psychological exaptation for processes that are adaptive, open-ended, and cumulative. Towards the end of the chapter, a brief overview of a quantum model for exaptation has been provided.

A cognitive transition underlying both technological and social aspects of cumulative culture

The argument that cumulative technological culture originates in technical-reasoning skills is not the only alternative to social accounts; another possibility is that accumulation of both technical-reasoning skills and enhanced social skills stemmed from the onset of a more basic cognitive ability such as recursive representational redescription. The paper confuses individual learning of pre-existing information with creative generation of new information.

Closing the symbolic reference gap to support flexible reasoning about the passage of time

This commentary relates Hoerl & McCormack's dual systems perspective to models of cognitive development emphasizing representational redescription and the role of culturally constructed tools, including language, in providing flexible formats for thinking. We describe developmental processes that enable children to construct a mental time line, situate themselves in time, and overcome the primacy of the here and now.