What Do Group Members Share? The Privileged Status of Cultural Knowledge for Children

Who Peeked? Children Infer the Likely Cause of Improbable Success

Some outcomes are brought about by intentional agents with access to information and others are not. Children use a variety of cues to infer the causes of outcomes, such as statistical reasoning (e.g., the probability of the outcome) and theory of mind (e.g., a person's perceptual access, preferences, or knowledge). Here we show that children use these cues to infer cheating, a finding which informs our understanding of the flexibility of children's theory of mind. In four experiments (N = 444), 4- to 7-year-olds saw vignettes about blindfolded agents retrieving 10 gumballs from a distribution of yummy and yucky gumballs. Children were then asked if agents were really blindfolded or had peeked. We manipulated the probability of the outcome (i.e., the correspondence between the distribution sampled from and the outcome produced) and the ordering of the outcome was patterned (e.g., five yummy then five yucky) or haphazard. From age 5, children began to use both cues to infer cheating, and also showed signs of flexibly integrating these cues. Together, these findings show that young children can detect cheaters, and that their theory of mind reasoning is flexible and not based on simple and rigid rules (e.g., equating not-seeing with failure). The findings also suggest that children use probabilistic reasoning to infer knowledge.

Children's expectations about the stability of others' knowledge and preference states

It is a crucial ability to predict others' psychological states across time and contexts. Focusing on cultural inventions such as songs and stories, we contrasted children's attributions of stability with others' knowledge and preference states across time and space and whether these attributions change as a function of children's familiarity with the known/liked items. Children (91 4-year-olds and 97 6-year-olds) were introduced to characters who knew or liked a song, a story, a game and a dance that were either novel or familiar. Children were asked whether the characters would still know/like these when they move to another city or when they grow up to be an adult. Both age groups expected these attributes to be more durable in the moving scenario compared with the growing-up scenario, but this trend became more robust with age. Whereas overall children did not judge knowledge as more durable than preferences, children found knowledge to be more enduring with age. The 6-year-olds' stability attributions also increased when known/liked items were familiar. These results suggest that, across the preschool years, children become more nuanced in their predictions about the future forms of knowledge and preference states.

Shared social groups or shared experiences? The effect of shared knowledge on children's perspective-taking

Although the ability to consider others' visual perspectives to interpret ambiguous communication emerges during childhood, people sometimes fail to attend to their partner's perspective. Two studies investigated whether 4- to 6-year-olds show a "closeness-communication bias" in their consideration of a partner's perspective in a communication task. Participants played a game that required them to take their partner's visual perspective in order to interpret an ambiguous instruction. If children, like adults, perform worse when they overestimate the extent to which their perspective is aligned with that of a partner, then they should make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a socially close partner compared with a more socially distant partner. In Study 1, social closeness was based on belonging to the same social group. In Study 2, social closeness was based on caregiving, a long-standing social relationship with a close kinship bond. Although social group membership did not affect children's consideration of their partner's perspective, children did make more perspective-taking errors when interacting with a close caregiver compared with a novel experimenter. These findings suggest that close personal relationships may be more likely to lead children to overestimate perspective alignment and hinder children's perspective-taking than shared social group membership, and they highlight important questions about the mechanisms underlying the effects of partner characteristics in perspective-taking tasks.

How cues to social categorization impact children's inferences about social categories

Social categorization involves two crucial processes: First, children seek properties on which they can categorize individuals, i.e., they learn to form social categories; then children make inferences based on social category membership and might develop affective responses toward social categories. Over the last decade, a growing number of research in developmental psychology started to use novel social categories to investigate how children learn and reason about social categories. To date, three types of cues have been put forward as means to form social categories, namely linguistic, visual, and behavioral cues. Based on social category membership, children draw inferences about the shared properties of social category members and about how social category members ought to behave and interact with each other. With additional input, children might apply essentialist beliefs to social categories and develop affective responses toward social categories. This article aims to provide key insights on the development of stereotypes and intergroup biases by reviewing recent works that investigated how children learn to form novel social categories and the kind of inferences they make about these novel social categories.

Can group representations based on relational cues warrant the rich inferences typically drawn from group membership?

Pietraszewski's model - though promising in many respects - needs to be extended so that it can explain the multitude of rich inferences that people draw from group membership. In this commentary, we highlight some facets of group thinking, especially from the field of developmental psychology, that cannot be unambiguously accounted for by a model that is built solely on relational cues.

The song, not the singer: Infants prefer to listen to familiar songs, regardless of singer identity

Parent's infant-directed vocalizations are highly dynamic and emotive compared to their adult-directed counterparts, and correspondingly, more effectively capture infants' attention. Infant-directed singing is a specific type of vocalization that is common throughout the world. Parents tend to sing a small handful of songs in a stereotyped way, and a number of recent studies have highlighted the significance of familiar songs in young children's social behaviors and evaluations. To date, no studies have examined whether infants' responses to familiar versus unfamiliar songs are modulated by singer identity (i.e., whether the singer is their own parent). In the present study, we investigated 9- to 12-month-old infants' (N = 29) behavioral and electrodermal responses to relatively familiar and unfamiliar songs sung by either their own mother or another infant's mother. Familiar songs recruited more attention and rhythmic movement, and lower electrodermal levels relative to unfamiliar songs. Moreover, these responses were robust regardless of whether the singer was their mother or a stranger, even when the stranger's rendition differed greatly from their mothers' in mean fundamental frequency and tempo. Results indicate that infants' interest in familiar songs is not limited to idiosyncratic characteristics of their parents' song renditions, and points to the potential for song as an effective early signifier of group membership.

The social meaning of common knowledge across development

Common knowledge can be a potent sign of shared social attributes among people, but not all knowledge is socially meaningful to the same extent. For instance, compared to shared knowledge of cultural practices, knowledge of self-evident facts might be a poorer indicator of shared group membership among individuals. Two studies explored adults' and 6-to-9 years old children's social inferences based on what others know as well as their sensitivity to the distinctions in the diagnostic potential of different kinds of knowledge. Participants were presented with targets who were knowledgeable about familiar things that are either culture-specific (e.g., a traditional dance) or general (e.g., a self-evident fact), and asked to make inferences about their language and where they live. Adults and 8-year-olds privileged culture-specific knowledge over general knowledge when making both kinds of inferences about the targets, whereas 6-year-olds did not distinguish between the two knowledge types. Thus, what others know is socially meaningful from early in life, and across development, children become increasingly aware of the diagnostic potential of culture-specific knowledge when making social inferences about others. These findings suggest novel social implications of knowledge assessment.