I recently had the pleasure of hearing a riveting presentation about ongoring research (at COrnell!) about how children understand the concept of free will, and relate it to themselves. In particular, I was intrigued when the conversation turned to an experiment where children are given a difficult task of self-control and then asked whether or not they could have done something other than what they did. What interested me most was the speaker’s remark that, when faced with moral quandaries, children gave different responses to the same sort of question than they did when faced with the task of self-control. Perhaps a child is better able to understand (and believe in) free will as an abstract concept (such as they are able to handle abstraction) than as a immediate question about themselves and their free will, the former being much more present in the discussion of morality (can someone choose to do right versus wrong?)? In any case, the discussion at the Rose Cafe was an intriguing one, and has given me much to chew on over winter break.