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Notes -
Huh, Chinese children mirror testing doesn’t seem to pull up much. Does anyone know at what age East Asians show self recognition in mirrors? Ideally looking for a study with Chinese or Koreans.
Hmm, I couldn't find anything either. I had just inferred that there was nothing to see there, given the focus on Kenyan children. However, I was assuming that they'd tested Chinese children, but from the abstract, the 2011 study apparently just tests Kenyan children, plus those from "Fiji, Saint Lucia, Grenada, and Peru... as well as children from urban United States and rural Canada."
So this literature looks even worse than I expected.
Also, I came across this part of the article: "In Fijian culture, for example, there is no “why” phrase that children can use"
I have a low prior in claims of deep linguistic differences between cultures. Sure enough, when I checked their references for that paragraph, they don't mention Fiji. (I might not be searching for the right words.) So this seems to be the sort of "There's an Amazonian tribe with no concept of time" bullshit that people hear at a conference and then repeat, often subtly distorting it.
I congratulate them on baking anti-teleology into their very language.
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