2-175 - Social statistics: How other people influence children’s affiliations, opinions, and behavior

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Recent research has shed light on how the development of statistical reasoning supports language acquisition and causal learning. This symposium considers the role of statistical reasoning in children’s apprehension of the social world. Four papers probe how children integrate statistical information from social agents and from their own experiences to select whom to befriend, decide whom and what to trust, and learn how the world around them works.

Paper 1 demonstrates how children integrate their own preferences with the statistical distribution of preferences in the general population to select social partners. Paper 2 explores how children reconcile statistical information about social consensus with their direct perceptions and information about informants; children are biased toward majority consensus, sometimes failing to consider other sources of information. Paper 3 investigates the interaction between statistical evidence and testimony in guiding children’s inductive inferences. Children who hear generic testimony from an individual have difficulty remembering and accurately using statistical information. Paper 4 similarly shows how testimony interacts with statistical information. While children use an informant’s (statistical) accuracy to distinguish helpful versus unhelpful information, the presence of an informant interferes with children’s ability to use statistical information from their own experiences.

Together, these studies highlight ways in which statistical and social information interact to guide how children understand and act in the world. By recruiting the ability to reason about the statistical properties of their environment, children can combine, balance, and interpret complex social and physical information to guide their inferences, learning, and social decisions.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Rista Plate, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Not all overlaps are equal: Social affiliation based on probability of overlaps in preferences - Presenting Author: Natalia Velez, Stanford University; Sophie Bridgers, Stanford University; Hyowon Gweon, Stanford University

• How do children balance the size of a majority with the quality of their information? - Presenting Author: Daphna Buchsbaum, University of Toronto; Andrew Whalen, The Roslin Institute, The University of Edinburgh; Jane Hu, University of Washington; Thomas L. Griffiths, University of California, Berkeley; Fei Xu, University of Connecticut

• Generic testimony influences children’s category learning from statistical evidence - Presenting Author: Tamar Kushnir, Cornell University; Susan A Gelman, University of Michigan

• Unhelpful social information hinders statistical learning - Presenting Author: Rista Plate, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Kristin Shutts, University of Wisconsin; Seth Pollak, University of Wisconsin