Children and Nature: Closing Workshop
The working group "Children and Nature" of LeipzigLab successfully concludes its four-year research at LeipzigLab. In the workshop, members of the working group present their research findings on the relationship between children and their living environment to the public. The event will be in English.
Programme
-
From 09.00 Coffee
09.30-09.45 Opening and welcome
09.45-10.30 Katja Liebal and Daniel Haun: The CaN project – an overview
10.30-11.15 Karri Neldner: Children’s developing intuitions about animal mind: A cross-cultural perspective
11.15-11.45 Coffee break
11.45-12.15 Magie Junker: Children’s pro-social action towards animals
12.15-12.45 Noemi Thiede: Moral attitudes towards humans and other animals
12.45-14.00 Lunch break
14.00-14.45 Introduction of local collaborators
14.45-15.15 Tom Herrnsdorf: Grouping of animate and inanimate objects by children from two socio-cultural contexts
15.15-15.45 Ebru Peközer: Children’s knowledge sources of animals
16.00-17.00 Coffee break, time for a walk
Talk with Dr. Luke McGuire
- 17.00-18.30 Public lecture by Dr. Luke McGuire, University of Exeter, UK: How we learn to love some animals and eat others
Humans have a complicated relationship with animals. Some, like dogs, we love as family members. Others, like pigs, are used for food or other resources. How this mixed picture of the moral ‘worth’ of different animals is taught to children and expressed in their moral cognitions and judgments remains relatively unknown. In this talk I will discuss some of the existing literature in this area, as well as my own studies which have examined the judgments and reasoning of children, adolescents, and adults in the West, with a particular focus on whether we ought to eat animals and how these judgments emerge alongside the concept of speciesism. Based on these early findings, a developmental model for understanding how judgments of eating animals emerges, pointing to an emergent meat-related cognitive dissonance which future work will aim to examine.