The working group „Children and Nature“ researches the attitudes of children and adolescents towards animals, the development of these attitudes up to adulthood and their variation in different socio-cultural contexts. In addition, it investigates which connections children perceive between the animate and inanimate world.
Disciplines involved: Human Biology, Anthropology and Developmental, Cross-cultural and Comparative Psychology at the Leipzig University and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
The Working Group "Children and Nature"
We research the relationship of children and young people to animals and investigate how they perceive connections between humans, other living beings and the inanimate environment. Our team is made up of researchers from different disciplines who contribute with their expertise with a mixed-method approache to the cross-cultural study of a child-nature-relationship.
We focus on children's and adolescents' cognitive and emotional attitudes towards animals, how these attitudes develop from pre-school to adolescence, and how they vary across societies depending on the type and role of the animal (e.g. pet, farm animal or pest). We would like to find out, for example, which animals children and adolescents from different countries know or like and which ones they don't, which animals they ascribe or ascribe certain characteristics to, and where they gather knowledge about animals from. We are also investigating the extent to which prosocial behaviour is shown towards animals or which moral concepts in the animal-human relationship children develop in comparison to adults across different societies, depending on the type and role of the animal.
Furthermore, we explore how and why children and adolescents relate animals as well as other living beings to the animate and inanimate world. We want to find out here what connections are drawn between the animate and inanimate environment and whether, for example, living beings and objects are grouped together because of their form, function or ecological aspects. Here, too, we are investigating if there is an influence of age and thee socio-cultural context.
Research interest of the working group
We are particularly interested in the psychological mechanisms that determine the cognitive and emotional attitudes and perceptions of children and young people towards animals and their environment. We also want to find out which factors influence the development of these attitudes. We focus on cultural variability and investigate universal cognitive mechanisms to gain a more sensitive understanding of how children and adolescents from different socio-cultural contexts perceive, think about or feel about their immediate environment, nature and different animals. Our diverse research interests result in a variety of sub-projects that have already become part of several final theses and provide a basis for upcoming publications.
Research approach
In the first explorative phase of our project, we use various qualitative and quantitative methods (mixed methods) from the fields of psychology and anthropology to gain comprehensive insight into the diversity of children's and young people's attitudes towards other living beings in different socio-cultural contexts. This first step is important because it provides a foundation for the second step in which experimental methods can be developed to both take cultural conditions into account and enable a systematic comparison between people from different societies.
Our partners
Department Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin; Department of Psychology, University of Plymouth and Institute for Research, Development and Evaluation, Pädagogische Hoschule Bern.
Duration
2020 – 2023
In a Nutshell
Everything at a glance: Here we answer the most important questions about our working group
Our research group is composed of researchers from the disciplines of developmental, cross-cultural and comparative psychology and anthropology at the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. We also work closely with researchers at the University of Plymouth, the Free University of Berlin and the Bern University of Teacher Education.
We study children's and adolescents' attitudes towards animals and the development of these attitudes in different socio-cultural contexts. In addition, we explore how children and adolescents from different societies relate to the animate and inanimate environment.
We use a child-centered, multi-method approach to conduct, for example, interviews and questionnaire as well as behavioral experiments (e.g. card sorting tasks) with children and adolescents between the ages of four and 17 in different countries. We work with communities in rural and urban areas, for example in China, India, Zambia, Ecuador, Syria and Germany.
