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Across cultures and languages, adults share a common intuitive picture of how mental abilities develop, a new study in Psychological Science finds.??

 
When does a child begin to reason? When do they develop self-control? Are some mental abilities present from birth, while others are acquired through experience? Questions like these have fascinated philosophers, educators, and scientists for centuries. Yet surprisingly little is known about how ordinary people think about the development of the mind itself. Do people across cultures think about the mind in similar ways?

An international study led by researchers from 黑料吃瓜网 and Rutgers University addresses this question. Surveying adults from six countries, the researchers found that people share a similar picture of how mental abilities develop, even across different cultures and languages.??
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Participants organize mental abilities into two types: those they think we are more likely to be born with and those they think we are more likely to pick up through experience. The findings, published in , suggest that even when specific beliefs vary across cultures and experiences, this two-dimensional structure remains stable.??
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Adults from Australia, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States were presented with 40 different mental capacities and asked: “At what age do you think a person first becomes capable of this?”?

Two dimensions of mental development 

The results revealed a consistent pattern. Across all six countries, people tended to divide mental capacities into two broad groups. The first included capacities such as feeling fear, hunger, and other basic sensory and emotional experiences. Participants generally believed these abilities emerge relatively early in life. The researchers refer to this group as the Perceptual–Experiential dimension.  
 
The second group included capacities such as reasoning, self-restraint, moral judgment, and pride. Participants consistently believed these abilities emerge later in development. This group was labeled the Reflective–Evaluative dimension. 
 
Rather than starting with a theory of how mental abilities should be categorized, the researchers let patterns emerge from the participants’ responses. Across all six cultures, languages, and survey formats, the same two-dimensional structure appeared, which suggests people around the world may share a common intuitive framework for understanding mental development.

Nature versus nurture 

The researchers also explored how people think about the origins of these mental capacities. Participants were asked to judge whether each ability was primarily due to nature (present from birth) or nurture (something we learn through experience). The pattern was clear.?
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Capacities belonging to the Perceptual–Experiential dimension were generally viewed as more innate, whereas capacities belonging to the Reflective–Evaluative dimension were viewed as more dependent on learning and experience. This is the same split philosophers and scientists have debated for centuries.?
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Beliefs about how the mind develops shape decisions every day. Parents’ expectations, educational practices, social policies, and public debates about human potential are shaped by assumptions about which abilities are innate and which must be learned.??
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The findings suggest that people share a consistent mental model of development. They do not think of the mind as a list of separate abilities. Instead, they imagine a developmental journey that begins with perception and experience and progresses toward reflection, evaluation, and self-understanding.?
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“Another important implication of our findings concerns a long-standing debate in the field of mind perception,” said Xianwei Meng, lead author and associate professor from the at 黑料吃瓜网.??
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“Previous research has proposed several competing models of how people perceive mental life. Our findings suggest that these models are not necessarily contradictory. Instead, the structure people perceive depends on the perspective they take. When people compare different kinds of entities, such as humans and robots, one structure emerges. When they think about the mind in a developmental context, a different structure emerges.”?
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Jinjing (Jenny) Wang of Rutgers University remarked: “Our findings show that people’s intuitive thinking looks highly similar to theoretical debates on the origins of the human mind. However, sharing a stable nature-nurture structure does not mean that the beliefs or theories themselves are fixed. Experiences, education, and scientific inquiries can all update our beliefs about specific mental capacities. On the other hand, research endeavors that look beyond this structure can bring new insights into understanding human development.”?
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The study provides one of the first systematic pictures of how people from different cultures conceptualize the growth of the human mind and suggests that beneath everyday conversations about childhood, education, and human nature lies a structured and widely shared theory of mental development.?

Paper information:  

Xianwei Meng, Ryuji Oguni, Kuniyuki Nishina, Taro Murakami, Yuka Mizuno, Jinjing (Jenny) Wang, 2026. How Does the Mind Grow? Cross-Cultural Intuitive Theories of Mental Development, Psychological Science. DOI:

Author Accepted Manuscript (Free access): https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xyt6f_v1?

Funding information:  

This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (23H03702, 23K28391, 22K20308, 23K12859, 23K02873).

Expert contact:

Xianwei Meng
Graduate School of Informatics 
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Email: meng@i.nagoya-u.ac.jp

Media contact:  

Merle Naidoo
International Communications Office
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Email: icomm_research@t.mail.nagoya-u.ac.jp

Top image:

Across six countries, adults share similar beliefs about how the mind develops. They tend to see basic sensory and emotional experiences such as feeling fear and hunger as more innate, while abilities such as reasoning and moral judgment are seen as more dependent on learning and experience. Credit: Xianwei Meng, 2026