We live in an increasingly pharmacological and medical world, in which
children and adults frequently encounter alleged treatments for an
enormous range of illnesses. How do we come to understand what heals and
why? Here, 15 studies explore how 1,414 children (ages 5-11) and 882
adults construe the efficacies of different kinds of cures.
Developmental patterns in folk physics, folk psychology, and folk
biology lead to predictions about which expectations about illnesses and
cures will remain relatively constant across development and which
expectations will undergo change. With respect to a constant framework,
we find that even young school children distinguish between physical and
psychological disorders and the treatments that would be most effective
for those disorders. In contrast, younger children reason differently
about temporal properties associated with cures. They often judge that
dramatic departures from prescribed schedules will continue to be
effective. They are also less likely than older ages to differentiate
between the treatment needs of acute versus chronic disorders, which in
turn reflect different intuitions about how medicines work. Younger
children see medicines as agent-like entities that migrate only to
afflicted regions while having "cure-all" properties, views that help
explain their difficulties grasping side effects. They also differ from
older children and adults by judging pain and effort as reducing,
instead of enhancing, a treatment's power. Finally, across all studies,
optimism about treatment efficacy declines with age. Taken together,
these studies show major developmental changes in how children envision
the ways medicines and other cures work in the body. These findings
reveal new dimensions of folk biology and its links to broader patterns
in cognitive development. They also carry strong implications for how
medicines should be provided and explained to children, as well as for
what kinds of medication myths might persevere even in adults.
