New research from a team led by Alison Gopnik at UC Berkeley, will build upon the team’s previous TWCF-funded project, "Understanding Caregiving: Biology, Psychology, & Policy," in which they argued that there are three distinctive aspects of caregiving. Care is altruistic, asymmetric and grounded in close, local, relationships. In this new project, the team will explore questions that remain about concepts of care in three different contexts, including:

1. Cognitive-development science of children's conceptions of care. While there has been extensive research on children's "theory of mind" and early social understanding, there is a lack of research on how children think about caregiving. This part of the research will involve studying how children develop ideas about caregiving from infancy to adulthood, including their understanding of in-groups and out-groups, dominance and alliance, and mental states. Questions such as “Is there an initial understanding of care even in infancy?” and “How do older children and adults think about caregiving, and how does that thinking differ from their understanding of other social and economic relationships?” will be explored.

2. How highly varied caregiving relationships — such as those of parents and young children, adult children caring for elderly parents, professional caregivers, and children receiving and giving care in different settings  — might influence cognitive conceptions of caregiving.

3. How attitudes and caregiving practices might vary across different cultures. In collaboration with anthropologists and psychologists, the project team plans to conduct assessments on the generalizability of cognitive conceptions of caregiving across a broad range of social structures in industrialized communities in the United States and Peru; forager-horticulturalists Shipibo-Konibo communities in the Amazon; and pastoralist OvaHimba communities in Namibia.

Gathering more research on caregiving in different contexts, the project team aims to propel rethinking of caregiving in academic disciplines and changes to caregiving policy and new approaches to child and elder care.