Could it? Should it? Cognitive reflection facilitates children's reasoning about possibility and permissibility

Children can be unduly skeptical of events that violate their expectations, claiming that these events neither could happen nor should happen even if the events violate no physical or social laws. Here, we explored whether children's reasoning about possibility and permissibility-modal cognition-is aided by cognitive reflection, or the disposition to privilege analysis over intuition. A total of 99 children aged 4 to 11 years judged the possibility and permissibility of several hypothetical events, and their judgments were compared with their scores on a developmental version of the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT-D). Children's CRT-D scores predicted their ability to differentiate possible events from impossible ones and their ability to differentiate impermissible events from permissible ones as well as their ability to differentiate possibility from permissibility in general. Such differentiations were predicted by children's CRT-D scores independent of age and executive function. These findings suggest that mature modal cognition may require the ability to reflect on, and override, the intuition that unexpected events cannot happen.