Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children revisited: comment on Dack and Astington

Dack and Astington (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 110 2011 94-114) attempted to replicate the deontic reasoning advantage among preschoolers reported by Cummins (Memory & Cognition 24 1996 823-829) and by Harris and Nuñez (Child Development. 67 1996 572-1591). Dack and Astington argued that the apparent deontic advantage reported by these studies was in fact an artifact due to a methodological confound, namely, inclusion of an authority in the deontic condition only. Removing this confound attenuated the effect in young children but had no effect on the reasoning of 7-year-olds and adults. Thus, removing reference to authority "explains away" young children's apparent precocity at this type of reasoning. But this explanation rests on (a) a misunderstanding of norms as targets of deontic reasoning and (b) conclusions based on a sample size that was too small to detect the effect in young children.